The landscape of African science fiction: technology and africanfuturism in the works of Nnedi Okorafor and Lauren Beukes

Abstract

This thesis examines the landscape of African Science Fiction (ASF) as a genre of African Literature (AL) from the lens of technology and Africanfuturism. African literature is often written and read from the past, positioning Africa as a backwater continent with no future technology and devoid of humanness, humaneness, and indigenous knowledge, yet African epistemologies and ontologies exist and portray new technologies in the present and in the future for the valuation of humans. The growing corpus of ASF employs African epistemologies and tremendous technology in mapping African futurity: contemporary ASF initiates a means of (re)imagining, (re)writing, and (re)reading African literary works. Specifically, this thesis shows how the explosion of the genre of ASF has shaped and distorted the modes of reading African works in a digital age, how it has dramatically brought fluidity to character identity as it found itself buffeted by flux and mutation, and above all how ASF has drastically altered the African concept of memory. The above is illustrated with a focus on the African humanist philosophies of Sankofa, Ubuntu, and Ujamaa, as they face new technologies, electronic information, multivalent identities and memory in the works of Nnedi Okorafor and Lauren Beukes, mainly in Who Fears Death, Moxyland, The Book of Phoenix, Binti, and Slipping.