YEBAF 2024: Nwonwu, Roberts, Onoguwe speak on speculative fiction, where the past meets the future
‘We are not just going to take western aspects of science fiction, we are going to take our culture, own it, export it’
By Anote Ajeluorou
THE inaugural edition of Yenagoa Book & Arts Festival 2024 may have come and gone, but the memories it generated still linger on for those who attended. Speculative fiction writing was one exciting panel session of the festival where three practitioners treated the audience to some of the nuances of that sub-genre of prose fiction. Author of How to Make a Space Masquerade, Mazi Nwonwu, author of Cupid’s Catapult, Hannah Onoguwe and author of The Creed of the Oracles, Ebi Roberts had a session o n ‘Speculative Fiction: When the Past and Future Collide’, with moderation provided by youthful Angel James (AJ Writes) whose expertise in steering the panel session showed promises of a great future before her in her chosen creative path.
For Nwonwu, the past and the future will always collide with the future drawing copiously from the past for Africa’s speculative or science fiction to gain currency and be distinct from the western type. But this would require a sound education for young people to tap into the inventive inspiration that speculative fiction necessarily engenders among tech-savvy young people. Indeed, Nwonwu made it clear speculative or science fiction is at the heart of the making of modern societies, as they draw from the ‘what if’ proposition inherent in science or speculative fiction. Any society that doesn’t pay attention to science fiction like China does will stand at the periphery of modernisation and may only be a mere spectator of the future that technology-driven possibilities of speculative fiction can bring into being. Nwonwu explains why most African writers tend to focus more on realistic rather than speculative fiction.
“Now, because of the economy and how bad things are in Africa, African writers tend to take on the political subjects, how governments have failed, how things keep going bad,” Nwonwu said. “So we tend not have a very optimistic view about things in our writing. But in terms of how this concept appears in literature as a way of bridging the past, the present and the future, I think we need to do more, because we’ve not done a quarter of what we need to do in terms of writing our own history, documenting our stories. There’s a whole lot of work to be done. The Chinese, Koreans, Japanese and Indians have done way better than we have both in music, movies and literature, in finding their culture. There’s so much we can do to get our culture out the right way. One thing we can do is take our future forward where in the 25th or 26th century Yenagoa, we have flying cars and you merely open a portal to hail a flying car and go to America or wherever. It’s something to look forward to.
“One thing that is very important is education, the right education. In 2007 the Chinese Government decided that it needs young people to read science fiction. The major reason they did that was because they went to Google and Microsoft and the big tech companies and everybody they spoke to, some of the designers, were asked what inspired them to create or design. And they discovered that everybody spoke to having read science fiction while they were young. So the Chinese Government invited science fiction writers to hold a comic conference. China wasn’t inventing things initially; they just produce according to your specifications, but all that has changed; they’ve gotten way better than anybody else in production.
“If you noticed, the Chinese have gotten way better in inventing things; they gave you the 4G and the 5G technology, because young people are now able to think the ‘what if’ situation, because that’s what science fiction is all about. ‘What if’ I can just open a door and appear in Port Harcourt? What if I did this and that and got that fantastic result? That’s how almost everything that has been invented was invented. But we need somebody to put it into writing. If you take the mobile phone now and go back to year 2001, the phone now is pure magic! And that’s how we have kept pushing young people into science fiction. But we are not just going to take western aspects of science fiction, we are going take our culture; that’s how we can own it; that’s how we can export it!”
Hannah Onoguwe; Festival Director, Annette David-West; Mazi Nwonwu; Angel James and Ebi Roberts after the panel session on speculative fiction
Roberts argued that science fiction “allows you to write about the past and write about the future. And an author once said that what used to be science fiction (in the past) is the reality of our lives today. Take Covid-19 pandemic and Ebola outbreak, for example; those are science fiction writ-large. Somewhere in the past, someone probably wrote about them happening in the future which became our contemporary world. So science fiction is something imagined that could happen in the future actually happening; something visualised to happen in the future from the past. It could be a perfect society, a perfect universe or (one that) is broken down in terms of law and order. So you imagine that something like this could happen. Science fiction is where we take advantage of technology and then be able to speak about where we are coming from and where we are possibly going to. With the help of speculative fiction, we can talk about the present, we can talk about the past, and we can also talk about the future.”
However, Nwonwu and Roberts were on divergent paths on the popularity or otherwise of speculative fiction. While Roberts argued that it is neither real writing or a popular art form in Africa, nay Nigeria, Nwonwu said otherwise, noting that most writings coming out of Africa, Nigeria were in fact speculative writing without the appellation tied to it.
According to Roberts, “Speculative fiction is not popular in this part of the world, not because we don’t have many writers who do it, but because the numbers are not as much as those who do normal fiction. Many of the writes here want to tell their stories from the perspective of realism. They want to write about what they know, what they see, what they feel. For instance, Niger Delta writers want to write about environmental degradation, water pollution; they want to write about climate change – those things around them. And speculative writing is about things that are not real. There are just few writers who consider that aspect. So there are just few of us who do speculative fiction. Like I said, the number is very small. As the name implies, speculative is something not real., imagining things that are not real and writing about them.”
“Let me respond to what Mr. Roberts just said about speculative fiction. Speculative fiction is indeed very popular; it’s just that we don’t call it that way. One of the first speculative fiction books written by a Nigerian is The Palmwine Drinkard and Forests of a Thousand Daemons by Amos Tutuola are speculative fiction. A couple of years ago, one of the most prominent writers of my generation is Elnathan John was nominated twice for the Caine Prize for his speculative fiction writing. If you have a story where a woman turns into a chicken in secondary school at night; that’s spec fic. But we don’t just call it spec fic because people tend more towards literary fiction that they consider most prestigious. That doesn’t mean spec fic is not popular.
“Nollywood is sort of saturated with speculative fiction. The ritual killings, those voodoo attacks at night or is it the uncle making someone impotent or not successful. Those are all themes in speculative fiction; we just don’t call it that. It’s easier for us to see Thor with his hammer as the god of thunder; but we can say the same thing for Sango; we can say the same thing for Amadioha; it’s just how we package it. They are all speculative fiction. It’s very popular. I usually say it’s our main style of literature in Africa.”
Nwonwu explained that his book How to Make a Space Masquerade is not necessarily a bridge between spirituality and science fiction, it relies heavily on his Igbo tradition and cosmic powers for its authenticity.
“My book takes a lot from my Igbo tradition and culture,” he said. “It’s science fiction leaning mostly towards the future. We have cars flying, people travelling to Mars and other planets and whatever galaxies there are. But it has a lot of Igbo culture, where you meet Igbo gods. So it’s more of the cosmology and the culture than spirituality. And we’ve always had these stories around us. My friend Wole Talabi published his novel last year, Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon. It’s this Yoruba god that was contracted by somebody to go to the British Museum and retrieve the mask head of Obalufon. It’s something that’s tied to history and tradition. So it’s about the gods; it’s about the history, but it’s also science fiction.
“In my book you see a whole lot of that. How a man dies in another planet and his friends come together and decide to take him home, but the guy refuses to go home. We have this story that is almost in every culture in Nigeria about corpses that refuse to go home, the car taking him home refusing to start; or they get somewhere and an accident occurs with the corpse in the car. It’s common in Africa. So yes, it’s been done and will continue to be done.”
Onoguwe explained her penchant for scary and gory scenes in her writing, noting, “In writing gory scenes, the challenge is putting yourself in a place where you have to speak to your fears, because movies are kind of easy, well, not so easy, but with the sound tracks, camera angle, you start getting scared, with the right visuals. With writing you have to use your senses where the reader is scared, when the reader is disgusted. So gory scenes are created by putting those things together – what are they seeing? So I think it helps when you put yourself in that space; something you’re afraid of, and you now project yourself into that space. So the thrill of the fear factor makes it more interesting.”
Onoguwe also tied speculative fiction and its role in the current buzz about climate change sweeping through the world, noting how climate change, climate action intersects with speculative fiction and the infinite possibilities speculative fiction is bringing to the conversation.
“In the past when people talk about climate change, usually it was all doom and dystopia, there’s Armageddon coming, the world is coming to an end,” she said. “It’s a cautionary tale to say, if we continue on this path there’s destruction; if we continue on this path, everybody is going to die. We have a lot of those stories in books, in movies; the apocalypses and things like that. I think the idea was to foster some awareness; that we’re doing things that harm the environment and harming biodiversity.
“So what has changed now and in the future, going forward, is a shift from all doom and gloom to ‘what can you do about it?’ and the actions we can take. We don’t have to be paralysed with fear, to say, ‘oh we are going to die; so what’s the point?’ The difference now is climate action, that there are things we can do to the environment that can make the difference. So it’s a shift from all gloom and doom to say there’s a bit of time to rectify this thing if we are aware and are willing to do one or two things.”
James took on Nwonwu about the difference between Afro-futurism and African futurism, two related concepts but with different outputs in different global geo-political spheres.
According to Nwonwu, “Afro-futurism and African futurism are similar concepts but vastly different. Afro-futurism was popularised by African-Americans and it includes literature, fashion, music and even politics. But African futurism is about African writers who write mostly science fiction, thinking mostly about what affects Africa and the future of the continent. Beyond this, the writers are also placing their culture, their values, their mores into that future. So you find stories set in, say 500 years from now, where you have people going back to worship the abandoned gods of their fathers.
“Another difference is that Afro-futurism has a lot of political aspects to it; it’s like a movement. But African futurism is not a movement; it’s just literature set in the future with all of Africa’s values of the past packed into it where Africans are trying to change the narrative. Like I keep mentioning, it’s like the Marvel Comics or franchise trying to revive the ancient European history and myths in films, especially the European (Roman and Greek) mythologies. African are also mining our gods, mining our stories, taking our folktales and putting them into the future. It’s like getting to a point where we don’t allow Westerners tell our stories, but by telling our stories by ourselves in a most audacious manner. My book How to Make a Space Masquerade is actually about making sure I put Igbo gods, Igbo tradition and culture into the heart of the stories without apologies.”
