2023/09/18 by Osei, Elizabeth Abena, Opoku-Agyemang, Kwabena
#Africanfuturism #Culture #Okorafor #Pan-Africanism #Sankofa #Speculative Fiction
paper · doi:10.57832/mgva-mp13
Nnedi Okorafor’s prolific writing embraces African speculative futures by delving into traditional African philosophies, lifestyles, experiences, and modes of being that cut across diverse African identities. We argue that Okorafor consistently imagines Pan-Africanist tropes by appropriating a medley of African cultural motifs into her texts. This is particularly true in her reappropriation of the Akan philosophical concept of Sankofa founded on the necessity to be grounded in the past to better engage with the future. Through the ensuing tradition-modernity dialectic, Okorafor presents modes of progress that imagines an Africa that moves away from Eurocentric notion of the continent. We will, in this essay, focus on Okorafor’s novels Zahrah the Windseeker (2005), Binti (2015), and Remote Control (2021), set in Nigeria, Namibia, and Ghana respectively. Using these different spaces, Okorafor’s work exudes Pan-Africanism by projecting various African cultures that promote identity in physical, social, and spiritual terms. Equally importantly, the different aspects of African culture that are employed in Okorafor’s texts relate with each other in ways that elide and disregard hegemonic representations. This decolonial set of relationships underlines the value of representing African identity in the futuristic imaginations that characterize these purposively selected novels. The three texts employ a wide selection of African cultural material that not only fuels character concerns, but also enhances thematic engagement with setting and other literary elements. This article examines how Okorafor achieves these literary aims by using Sankofa as her inspiration. Employing the concept of Sankofa to these ends further advances the course of decolonization by reclaiming history, culture, and power to de-center black speculative fiction from the generic conventions of white hegemonic science fiction. This exploration thus becomes a source of innovation for African-futures, thereby fitting directly into Okorafor’s coinage of the term Africanfuturism: a breakaway from Afrofuturism.