Is Nigerian Literature Too Timid?

That's the contention of Charles Nnolim, a professor that won last year's National Merit Award from the Nigeria's government--even as he acknowledges the significant proportion of prominent African writers with Nigerian roots. Of especial interest is his hope for a tradition of speculative and science fiction to emerge from African artists:

Nnolim has also recommended utopian literature to African writers, and his reasons for that are manifold. “We have no reality that is impracticable. The issue is that, because of the way we were enslaved and colonised, we are too timid to write about others; we are too timid to talk about the future. The white man writes what we call fortuitous literature and science literature. We don’t have science literature in Africa. Science literature projects time in the future and starts out to solve the problem. A French writer, in 1860, wrote on the journey from the earth to the moon, projecting a time when man would launch a satellite to the moon, and one hundred years later, America launched a satellite to the moon. But what African writers do is to look backwards to when our grandfathers were this and that, all the Timbuktu greatness, and we have not been able to look into the future; and it is affecting our governmental plans, because if you don’t look into the future, you won’t reach out,” he said.

I don't agree that the dearth of African science fiction necessarily equates into a fiction tradition that "looks backwards." But would I be avidly interested in experiments in science fiction from African writers? Yes, yes, yes.

Comments

[Ivor W. Hartmann]

Hi Isak. Thought this might be of some interest to you in respect to AFS (African Science Fiction). While it is true there are not that many of us, our numbers are slowly growing. The active AFS writers I know of are: Lauren Buekes, Nnedi Okorafor, Daliso Chaponda, Jonathan Elorm Dotse (wrote a great recent article on AFS here: http://blogs.african-writing.com/blog/archives/61), Henrietta Rose-Innes, Nick Wood, and I.

[Anna Clark]

Thank you, Ivor, for the reading recommendations! I'll be sure to follow up...