A hiss and a loud ‘ping’ announced the arrival of breakfast, in the manner in which all his meals were delivered from below. It made no sense if the victuals came from above. But from how far below, he could not tell.

With another ‘ping’ a little metal door in the wall slid open and a loaded dinner tray lay revealed on a stainless steel platform. It was a small elevator system: after the meal was over he would return the dishes and the tray to the platform. The little metal door would slide shut.

Sometimes he toyed with the idea of escape via that route, but the space was only large enough to carry the dishes and the occasional bottle of wine ...

The dining table in the cell was not large. It was meant for two people and had a round Formica top with a most exquisite design: startling white with an ingrained spiral of vanishing grey. The spiral started out in the middle of the circular top and spread out in tight windings to the edge. The table legs, made of stainless steel, were just about as thin as his little finger, and each was coiled into a helix.

There were two identical chairs at opposite sides of the table, made of polished wood and steel.

At every meal he wondered about the other seat standing mockingly vacant ...

From “Spiral”, first published in Mr Happy and the Hammer of God

Martin Egblewogbe covers many bases.

He’s a working physicist and university lecturer in that field. He is a poet, and a prose writer whose fiction crosses literary boundaries, influenced by Kafka, Beckett, Asimov, and the great African realists and surrealists. One writer he sometimes reminds me of is another Ghanaian, the great B. Kojo Laing. Sometimes Egblewogbe’s stories explore African traditions from a scientific perspective.

His last great publishing success was in 2012, a volume of short stories, Mr Happy and the Hammer of God, but in 2017 when we spoke, the year of Kojo Laing’s death, Egblewogbe was facing the difficulties of being a writer on the continent.

On the Ghanaian literary scene, he is an indispensable figure, tirelessly promoting reading and local literature in Accra.

He has a story published by Ayiba in their collection All the Good Things Around Us edited by Ivor Agyeman-Duah, containing work by the who’s who of African authors including Ama Ata Aidoo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Shadreck Chikoti. ). That story was “...and the dog lay there dying”. He wrote a vivid article based on stories told him by Accra taxi drivers, “The Ferryman” in Litro magazine.  The 2014 Caine Prize anthology The Gonjon Pin and Other Stories was named after his contribution.

I meet him in his lab at the expansive, low-lying campus of the University of Ghana, and from there we go to the bougainvillea-fringed staff club. As always with these interviews, I ask him how to pronounce his name. It is something like Egg-bla-oh-bay. He starts to talk about his writing.

Martin: “I’ve been working on a new collection of short stories that’s been bounced by a number of publishers. I was hoping it would be published this year. I think it’s a much better collection than the first collection, which is Mr Happy and the Hammer of God.”

Of that first collection Chimurenga’s The Chronic said:

The setting of Martin Egblewogbe’s debut collection of short stories is mostly in Accra but the space it occupies is Achille Mbembe’s postcolony: “a reality that is made up of superstitions, narratives and fictions that claim to be true in the very act through which they produce the false, while at the same time giving rise to both terror, hilarity and astonishment.” It’s a time-space characterised by different, intersected and entwined threads and themes in tension with one another. Stuck between ghettoisation and globalisation, bureaucracy and chaos, tedium and crisis, exhaustion and acceleration, the characters in these stories have long abandoned ontological questions, preferring to escape into wild flights of existential and metaphysical fancy.

Martin: “In between that publication and the second collection—which I consider as milestones more or less—in between them are several little outputs, short stories mainly that have appeared in different places (for example, “Fever” in Afreada). There are a few other very strange ones. One of them is on a website called Timbuktu and is the story about a man who in the final of a chess competition decides to go stark naked. (Chuckles)”

GR: “Why did he do that?”

Martin: “It doesn’t say that in the story, just that he wanted to finish the competition naked and he didn’t think about it until he got arrested. (Chuckles).

“And then I think in terms of successful writing that’s about it. I’ve been writing since I was eight or so. The output then was rather foolish but it all built me up to what I am now.”

GR: “They say it takes ten years to learn how to write.”

Martin: “At least you will be resilient if you survive ten years. (Chuckles).”

GR: “Does the physics have any input into the writing?”

Martin: “Yes, I think it does. It has a lot of input, even down to how I construct the stories. There are some stories that are laid out on a blackboard. So you have a full idea of where things are going, what needs to be put in it. And then I think there are some ideas that I think are directly from science. The way the characters think and the things that bother them. I think those are very strongly coming from the scientific background.

“There’s this story called in the first collection, ‘Spiral’. Someone is trapped in a tower, a very high tower and he’s alone in this cell. And strange things keep happening in there. The room itself has two chairs and one lone table. And since he’s alone he has no understanding of why there should be another chair. The construction of the chairs is such that their legs are in a spin, a helix. Some of the legs are in right-handed helix and some of the legs are in a left-handed helix. He is there wondering how the whole thing came to be and he borrows ideas from quantum mechanics that by observing you create. Things are not physically realizable until they are observed. They are in potentia.

“In the end, he hears some footsteps, which are coming up from below, and he’s wondering where the footsteps are going, and he ends up wither in terror that the footsteps will come right by his door.”

I ask him about the research he’s doing.

Martin: “It’s called condensed matter physics. What I’ve been working on last few years is synthesizing zinc oxide compounds or compounds that are like zinc oxide. And making nanopowders of them and cauterizing them.

“Why it is still worth pursuing is that zinc oxide has potential for being a very good electro-luminescent material. And so that is the focus of the research. How are you able to coax this material to somehow deliver light when you run an electric current through it?

“You have the nanoparticles suspended in a polymer. So you have something like a polyethylene oxide. Sometimes you want to use a polymer that is able to emit positive charges because zinc oxide is electron rich. If you are able to do it well, you will have these nanoparticles, each of which can emit an electron, surrounded by a polymer which can also give off a hole. If you have an electron hole in isolation that gives rise to a photon. So that is your light-giving material already because all you need to do is apply a potential difference. The electrons jump out and combine with holes, and then you get your light coming out.”

We joke about his mad scientist lab and jars with tentacles in them. We switch back to fiction. We talk about Henrietta Rose-Innes, a writer I call a fellow traveller to science fiction, whose concerns overlap with it. It seemed to me that some of the stories in Mr Happy and the Hammer of God had slight elements of magic realism and spiritual realism.

Martin: “Um. So if I think about the last two stories in the second part of Mr Happy, yes they actually have a lot of magical realism. I think that ‘Jjork’ would be the most quote-unquote bizarre. I mean with all those elements. Here is a personality who is living in his mind. The whole construct is in someone’s mind. It doesn’t really exist. But then we have all these fascinating things that happen. For example, Jjork is in a room suspended right at the top of this cube that is hollow ... I was just really trying to identify the idea of power that gets thrown down. To begin with, this personality envisages himself as the all-in-all. Until he’s challenged and then he feels that he really doesn’t have the power he thought he had ...

(Spoiler)

... and ends up destroying himself by throwing himself off the building.

“That really was the idea behind it. The thought of a person’s worldview being so severely challenged but they have no option other than to self-destruct. Or the challenge itself is self-destruction.

“That story was written when I was having a very serious issues with religion. I think I got into this state where I felt that my religious concepts were facing a very severe challenge from myself.

“That story I wouldn’t even call magic realism. Classifying the stories is very difficult for me. I don’t know what to call them (Laughs).

“‘Mr Happy’ is the last-but-one story. The final three stories are becoming more and more unrealistic from story to story. In ‘Mr Happy’ itself, it’s the character’s insanity that brings in the show of things that are not real. But in ‘Three Conversations with Ayuba’ the unrealistic things are built into the story.

“I don’t know if you’ve seen ‘The Gonjon Pin’ [his contribution to the Caine Prize anthology The Gonjon Pin and Other Stories 2014]. There’s a chap who finds on his wall the scrotum of someone he doesn’t know."

GR: “Scrotum? How does he know it’s the scrotum of someone he doesn’t know? Why not the scrotum of a friend?”

Martin: “That’s ... that’s ... that’s ...(Cracking up). He doesn’t know that he doesn’t know him that’s true. This is a man who has been kicked out of university. He’s a fairly bright chap. He’s trying to write computer code to predict the lottery. His next-door neighbour has a mental breakdown and runs out of his room naked. But those events are connected with the appearance in this computer guy’s room of somebody’s scrotum hanging on the wall. This drives him almost insane for a number of days until he chisels the wall and removes the entire section of the wall. So that I think also signifies my approach to magical realism where people who are otherwise sane get confronted with things that are a bit bizarre.

“This thing with the scrotum has a link with stories from Ghanaian folklore. It’s turned into a joke now, but going to see a fetish priest and not providing fully what the fetish priest asks. For example, the fetish priest wants a totally white boot, but you present a boot with a spot on it. So there’s this story that someone goes for a charm to make them vanish and they present an animal with a blemish. They need to use the charm to vanish, but when they vanish they leave a bit of their body behind.

“The thing that is freshest in my mind right now are stories I’m working on now. They’re not published and I don’t know if they really will be, but people are interested.

“There will always be stories that are entirely in people’s minds. I don’t think I’ll ever stop doing that because it allows you to explore vistas which are really vast. Anything can happen in somebody’s imagination.

“And then there are some that are now becoming more focussed on little things in people’s lives. For example, there is a story which has to do with someone remembering an instant that happened when he was in secondary school, a very little incident of being ignored by someone’s mother, which carries on through his life. He is trying to connect all the dots in his life to that incident and why it may have ruined his life.

“I have no good idea what makes me write a particular kind of piece. There’s no structure. Most times when I am undergoing some sort of distress, then I write. There’s no real form as to what the output is. I can’t say I’m writing more of this or less of that or that my writing is going in this direction or that direction.

“The story that I want to write which foremost in my mind is to do with paranoia. I think it’s again because again of the idea of living in someone’s mind. I find it fascinating that someone can be locked in their mind with just a terror of anyone understanding them and it’s impossible to break out into a realistic scenario that some people like you, some people don’t like you.

“Then I am also working on this story; this is straight out sci-fi about a fugitive nuclear engineer on some planet that is terraformed. The planet derives its electrical power for the terraformation to keep going from a nuclear reactor. This has been going on ages and there is just one person who can run that reactor. Unfortunately, that chap is a fugitive who is being pursued by the industrial galactic police. And so finally where the story is set in the final stages coming to get him. If they get him the planet shuts down. I’ve only thought of the story. It’s been on my mind maybe for a decade but I’ve never put that structure.

“There is this third story that I actually submitted a synopsis to the Miles Morland Foundation in hope that they would fund it.

“I am trying to bring together the whole idea of African magic and what it looks like with the very sophisticated science of what the human brain is capable of now. It’s about a person who through drugs finally finds he can use a lot more of his brain but more importantly he can connect to other brains and take control of them. This becomes very important for the military people. It means that a fighting army can be controlled as one organism with a thousand hands. He can control not only humans but also birds, so he can see through the eyes of birds.

“So that one has an outline, but the Foundation didn’t like it much so they didn’t give me the money to write it. Those are three projects that I would like to work on. I will always write my short stories because they are always like pressure valves.”

We talk about how difficult it is to find time to write.

Martin: “Unfortunately, this is a very bad thing. I will change it. I work all the time. So sometimes during working hours I steal time from the university and write. Other times I’m here weekends because I have to sort stuff out in the lab. Typically I’m here every day till eight or ten, Saturdays and Sundays. It’s a very horrible life. My family doesn’t like it either. But I try. There are some days I spend at home.”

We start to talk about his journey as a writer.

Martin: “My father was a professor here [University of Ghana] in linguistics. So there were lots of books in the house. Many of them were over my head. The children’s books, I started with from the primary school and they were running a British curriculum, so we were reading books straight out of England. My memory is quite poor, but I remember these brightly coloured books full of motorboats” (Laughs).

GR: “And snow.”

Martin: “Snow yes. And we had lots of these rhymes. Coming into my first-year Class One, those were the books we’d be reading. That would be about six to seven. And then we had a pretty well-stocked library. So we did the Hardy Boys thing, the Nancy Drews. And then at that time there was a series called Pacesetters, very small books about eighty to one hundred pages. Written mainly by Nigerians, racy action stories.

“I think from about Class Five, they all of a sudden became a fad. ‘Have you read this? I’ve read this.’ And so the stories went round and round. I think the Pacesetters were really exciting. Most of my class had read them. Six months down the line there would be another title that no one had read so it was a challenge ‘I want to read this one.’"

(Some of Faith Ben-Daniels's early favourite works were also published in the Pacesetters series. Some of them had fantasy of spiritual realism elements.)

“Then I began to read more difficult works quite early. I think I read a lot of J. R. R. Tolkien about twelve or thirteen. I liked it so much the story stuck in my mind and when late 2000s I found a copy of the trilogy, I just bought it right off because I remembered it from way back when.

“From my father’s libraries, there were all these African Writers series—Achebe, wa Thiong’o. There was also Kafka.

“Then the reading took a hit when I went to secondary school because we had a library that didn’t have a lot of novels. As somebody who would typically spend all my free time in the library in primary school, I found that the secondary school library only had books, not novels. My reading shifted to when I came home on the holidays. It was a big help that there was a library in our house so there was some stuff to read.”

GR: “When did you say, 'I’m going to write?'”

Martin: “Actually, I started writing soon after I started reading. I remember it because my elder brother (He starts to laugh) he would remind me of a story. He kept laughing at me for ages. It was some story about a king and all sorts of shenanigans and there was a last line that he would always remind me of: ‘He collapsed and died.’ Many years down the line my brother was springing up and saying ‘Ah and then he collapsed and died’ (Laughs again).”

GR: “Sounds good to me. A nice spectacular ending.”

Martin: “That was probably ‘82 or ‘84. I was born in ‘75.

“I can’t put an age to it. You see, sometimes I don’t write for long periods. Just recently I could say, maybe probably after university that I would say, ‘Yeah my writing makes some sense, I should stick to it.’

“Previously I would write when something was bothering me. And I think much earlier on I was just writing as a way of replicating what I had read. When I read a mystery story for children, I’d try to write a mystery story around me and my friends. Seeing some tyre tracks and trying to investigate. But I don’t think it was a serious stuff until much later when I left university and was writing things I really felt.”

GR: “Jonathan Dotse talks of the difficulty of writing science fiction set in Ghana. Do you feel that?”

Martin: “Personally no. I think that you very easily borrow from the work that is already in existence. If you are reading lots of European literature and stuff you just plug in. Somehow you think you are some kind of European or American when it comes to writing. Let’s put it this way—Kafka and Becket have been very strong influences on me. More than I would say any African writer because of the extent of their imaginings.

“When I much younger I did my bit of science fiction. Not pulp science fiction—things like Gene Wolfe and Ursula Le Guin. People who really imagined worlds. Of course Asimov. And then Russian science fiction.”

GR: “You were able to get hold of the books. Some of the younger writers really haven’t been able to.”

Martin: “Maybe they didn’t look hard enough. Some of the science fiction I got from people who do these flea market kind of sales. They have piles of books that someone from the US shipped down. If you go through them you will find things like the Nebula Award story collections that I bought. I got them from places like that. The Forever War.”

I tell him that he was a book hunter, like Mehul Gohil in Nairobi who wrote a blog about how to find books. We talk about The Forever War and how imaginative it was and so grounded in the Vietnam War. He gets another phone call and the interview interrupts. I tease him about his brother and suggest that he ends one of his new stories “And he collapsed and died.”

I then ask him about his work for The Writers Project of Ghana.

Martin: “So I think the real genesis of the thing was in around ‘99 or 2000 when I got introduced to a radio programme that was running on campus radio. I got to host the show for about seven years to about 2007. I used that to build a certain community of people who were interested in writing, poets.

“In 2009 this American writer Laban Carrick Hill visited. He was a visiting professor at the University of Cape Coast. And he found one of my poems in an anthology so he got in touch with me and we had a conversation pretty much like this. We became friends. He thought we should organize a few reading events, so I just called on the network that already existed. We organized a couple of reading events and that went really well.

“After that we thought maybe we should form an organization. So we started what we called initially the African Poetry Project. About six months down the line we changed it to the Writers Project of Ghana. And the whole idea was to expose the voice of writers, make writers more visible and also create fora for them to interact with their readers

“So we organize readings. We publish anthologies. We’ve put out two anthologies of poetry so far and we are working on a third anthology but that’s of short stories. We run a radio programme. We been running the radio programme since 2009, a weekly radio programme. It’s on CitiFM 97.3.

“On our website we have a podcast page and we have a weekly show. It’s actually streamed live across the world. This year we’ve been having participation of people who are not locals. For example, a week ago we had a Canadian poet, Rob Taylor on the show. For a radio show we’ve become less Ghanaian orientated. We’ve wanted to explore as much as possible with guests from other countries.

“We have a reading series. I think it’s the longest running and I would say most consistent reading series in Accra. We’ve been on this since 2009. We are currently doing the reading series in collaboration with the Goethe Institut. We’ve had fantastic people from across Africa. We’ve had Sefi Atta, Ama Aidoo, Chuma Nwokolo, Manu Herbstein, and most amazing of all, Kojo Laing.”

GR: “That’s a great list.”

Martin: “We’ve probably done almost fifty different writers. This month we are having two co-authors Estelle Appiah and Margaret Rouse-Jones. Margaret is coming from the Dominica and Estelle is in Ghana, they are reading a book Returned Exile, a biography of a man who returned from Dominica to Liberia.

“We organize writing workshops too. We’ve had a few. Including some with this crime fiction writer from the United States. He’s Ghanaian, Kwei Quartey. He writes a lot of crime fiction. He’s based in Pasadena. He’s done a reading for us. He’s done workshops. He’s also been on the radio show.”

GR: “What are the issues for African writers?”

Martin: “The main issue is that there doesn’t seem to be a critical mass of readers. That’s the main thing. You hear ghastly stories of a publisher being unable to sell a thousand copies of a title. Something like that beats my imagination. If we say that across the country we are about eight million voters, that means eight million adults who should be able to read. Why can’t you sell a thousand copies of a book to them? I believe that a key thing is that we don’t have enough people who are interested in just sitting down and reading a book. And I think that is the main block because once people are reading you have an output.

“As a writer, you need to know your work is going somewhere. You’re getting feedback. You need an audience of one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand. Once we are able to build that space locally, the work is done.

“The roadblock I see is that a Ghanaian writer is having to pitch his story at the West all the time. When you think about it, why should an American reader be interested in your story? Americans are churning out their own stories anyway. So I think that growing a local readership is to me the biggest barrier.”

GR: “I would agree very much. Even with all these stories online from African magazines saying these stories are for you, the writers are writing to sell to Western magazines. It’s different for comics, which are thriving in Africa, like The Comic Republic, publishing mainly for phones and the web. They seem to have leapfrogged over print and desktop computing.”

Martin: “You know I think that we will never ever leapfrog writing. I don’t see how realistically as a society we can build anything that is intellectually robust without making sure there are writers and there are readers. I am not someone who is fascinated by games, 3D immersive technology. Frankly, I’d rather take a walk. I can see doing the CGI stuff is really exciting. Pushing technology to its limit. But I think at a certain point it will just be something that is there, its been done to show that, yeah, we can do that. We fall back on the very rich spectrum that is available in nature. We’ll take a walk in the garden and that beats virtual reality.

“I have met many many people who write, and some of them have great ideas but they have met a roadblock. Because nobody’s reading. There’s no challenge. There’s no reason for them to challenge themselves and so they are stuck. They are circling in some kind of stagnant pool.”

GR: “So how do you get more readers?”

Martin: “Some people are not reading because they can’t. They haven’t been taught how to read. Technically they see words and they can’t pronounce them. That’s an entirely educational thing. People have to be taught in schools and in homes.

“But then there is also another group of people who can read perfectly well, but they don’t care. Nothing has made them excited about reading for pleasure. They can read hundreds of self-improvement books, which will just improve the writers of the books. So they are interested in reading something but it’s just they will not pick a book of fiction.

“For such people, I believe that things like public readings where they get to meet a writer who is living and sitting there, and they can talk to them and buy the book after that—things like that I believe will encourage people who functionally read but just haven’t found a reason to do that.

“The second thing that I believe will work is a book club. The Writer’s Project has a book club. Every month we select a title and we read it. Especially for professionals who have the strange idea that because they are working they don’t have time to read, being part of a book club they meet people like them, who can read. Spend twenty minutes in the morning to read a novel.

“Finally somehow we have to expand the conversation about books. If you turn on the radio, and somebody is talking about a book. You have a conversation with somebody and there’s a quotation from a book. You know, just making books part of the conversation makes them come alive. So you know they are there. Rarely do you have a conversation during the day with colleagues about a book, it just doesn’t come up.”

Since this Interview

Martin’s second collection of stories The Waiting has been announced for publication in February 2020 from Nii Parkes’s company Flipped Eye.

The old man with the third hand sat on the beach and watched the waves wash over the sand.

I’d seen him before. Everyone had. Some people assumed he was crazy. Others thought he was just lonely, sitting out there by himself day after day, staring at where the ocean seemed to merge with the sky. Not very many people found the third hand growing out of his back terribly interesting. This was, after all, the town that had produced the infamous Inside-Out Girl.

All the same, there was something about the old man with the third hand, something about the way he sat in the same old rocking chair, rocking back and forth almost in sync with the waves that made the townspeople stay away from him. Nobody ever went down to the stretch of beach on which the old man sat and stared at the sea.

But I did.

—“The Old Man with the Third Hand,” The Manchester Review, issue 18

Kofi Nyameye is a pen name. This young writer is actually called Nyameye Dwomo-Anokye. You might find some of his earlier online work under that name. I start out by asking him how to pronounce it—something like “Nya-may-yay Joo-moh A-notch-chay”).

Nyameye: “In the Twi language of Ghana, it means God is Good. ‘Nyame’ is for God and ‘eye’ is good.

“There’s an interesting story behind my name if you want to hear it. It doesn’t look it right now, but when I was born, my head was really big. Really big. My mother was giving birth to me and my head wouldn’t come out. lt just got stuck for over twelve hours.

“The doctors thought my mother would die, and I would die with her. My family thought I’d die. My father began to pray and promised the Lord that if He delivered my mother and me, my father would name me after Him. So two hours later I came out, and my father said, ‘We will name him God is Good and that’s my name.'

“Can I ask you a question? Why are you doing this?”

So I explain the history of how I came to be curating the 100 African series. Basically, I felt a blunt push from about 2009. I got a grant from the British Council to set up a creative writing course at Benue State University. I taught it with Chuma, the guy you just met. The guy can really teach people to write poetry. He’s also a great novelist. And he’s one of these fellow travellers to speculative fiction. There’s always something different about his stuff. At Benue, I found this book of Famine in Heaven, spaceships, feminism. I thought, there’s got to be more of this, so I found www.afrocyberpunk by Jonathan Dotse. It became an interest and hobby. It’s about the only thing I do now. It’s something brand new brewing. It wasn’t there in 2009. People said Africans don’t write science fiction, we have too many real problems. It’s a Western thing. I don’t think so. When you’ve lost the past, you immediately start looking for a future. When someone else has described your past you say, Thank you, we’ll describe our own past, our own culture. Maybe half of Africa’s languages will disappear by 2090, someone was telling me. Taking all that culture with them. But let’s preserve what we can now.

 GR: “Now you’re interviewing me.”

Nyameye: “Yes I am. I was very nervous about this meeting. Among the more quote, unquote African writers I am a bit of an anomaly. Many people have tried to change what I write. They try to tell me to write more traditionally African stories.

“I read a couple of people you interviewed, and they grew up reading these Western stories. The Famous Five. The Hardy Boys. They read them and we saw them on TV. Then they grew up and realized that they were actually interested in more traditional African stories. And they switched. And we call them African writers—whey hey.

“But I feel like I never did. Which is a very uncomfortable situation to be in. I never switched to super-African focussed writing. It’s always been a bone of contention among my friends” (Laughs).

I say that an African writer should be able to write about anything they chose to write about. If you are African, the book is African.

Nyameye: “Thank you. Nobody has ever said it to me before. Ever. So am I a science fiction writer? I think of myself more as a speculative fiction writer. Yes, science fiction falls into speculative, so yes. But I also write a lot about demons and monsters. The novel I just finished on Sunday... plug” (Laughs for a while).

GR: “What’s it called?”

Nyameye: “It’s called The Desolation of Charlie Gray. It’s about a boy who meets a demon that gives him the power to read minds. But every time he does, he goes just a little bit more crazy and that’s the focus. You can use this power for a lot of good, but it costs a little bit of yourself every time you do.”

We talk a bit about Lesley N. Arimah’s “What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky,” in which similarly healing people costs the sanity of the healer.

Nyameye: “A story I wrote, ‘The Men who Dance with Stars’—I just got a image of two men in a spaceship out of nowhere and I thought, ‘Hmmm, what are they doing?’ And I thought, ‘What if they were there to steal someone’s sun?’ And it just made so much sense to me. Because for me as a writer the world that exists is so much less interesting than what could possibly be.

Later I helped Nyameye, now writing as Kofi Nyameye, place that story with Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine as “The Lights Go Out, One by One.” It starts like this:

They told us emerging from cryosleep was like surfacing from the depths of a clear lake on a perfect summer’s day: a peaceful ascent from deep unconsciousness, delivering us once again to the land of the living. Almost like being born again.

They were wrong. Emerging from cryosleep is like waking up from a bad dream. You fight your way toward awakeness as your brain realizes you’re breathing liquid and panics, but at the same time a part of you wants to stay down, stay asleep, find out just how deep the dream goes.

That, at least, is how it is for me.

The cryosleep pod fits around my body like a coffin. The minutes I spend in darkness waiting for the liquid perfluorocarbons to drain out of my lungs and leave my body able to breathe air again are some of the longest minutes of my life. Within this time, my disorientation fades. I remember who I am, where I am, why I’m here.

Who I am: an employee of the United World Government, Deep Space Division. This I have been since I was born. I do not know how, or what it means, to be anything else.

Where I am: Aboard the UWG Solstice V, somewhere in the Perseus arm of the Milky Way, thousands of light-years from Earth.

Why I’m here: To save the human race.

And here emerging from cryosleep is again like waking up from a bad dream, for once I remember these things I want nothing more than to close my eyes and go back to sleep.

Because if I’m awake, then it means all the other teams have failed.

We talk about this story about stealing another system’s sun and possible parallels with colonialism, of how it stole resources. Was that on his mind when he wrote the story?

Nyameye: “Not consciously. Something has happened to me once or twice. I write a story, and the people I show it to wind up telling me what I am writing about. In 2013 I wrote a story about a man who kills his wife and every year tries to atone with a new woman but winds up killing her as well.

“I sent it out to friends and everyone’s like ‘Whooooo, great.’ One guy was like ‘You’ve written about yourself.’ Which is a very uncomfortable thing to hear when you’ve talking about a serial killer. But it made a lot of sense when he explained it to me. It’s very possible that that on some level that was on my mind.

Issue of Asimov’s containing Kofi’s story.

“I’ve read brilliant books about people and communities, economics and governments, and that’s just fine; but I’m more interested in ‘What if?’

“The world we see and live in is a lot less interesting than the world of What If. And if I can make you see the world of What If for just ten minutes as a possibility, if you read my story and you walk away asking what if that happened, then, you know...”

GR: “The story’s worked.”

Nyameye: “What if we woke up one day and a race of aliens stole our sun? What if a river fell in love? If I make you think that for one minute then it’s a good story, and it was worth writing. So to answer your question, I see myself as a science fiction writer because science fiction exists in the world of speculation, the world of What If.

“In 2012 I was very big in social media on Twitter, very active, started my blog to put stories on, and Wole (Talabi) read one of my stories. There was a writing competition in his blog that The Naked Convos was doing.

“I wrote one story, not really a speculative story, about domestic abuse. I also wrote a one-thousand-word story about an asteroid that hits the Earth and makes everyone a zombie. Wole used his editorial power to get it into the competition. It came third. Wole became interested in me and started reaching out for stories.

“The Naked Convos was a huge organization at the time. He was known as the Alchemist and the Alchemist’s Corner published stories. He was one of the first people to be where I wanted to be who told me I was good.

“For the past three years, I’ve pretty much been living in a cave somewhere. It was very personal. I was rebuilding my life so to speak. I was one person in 2013 and then something happened in my personal life. It threw me into a loop.

“It helped that where I live is really far from anywhere where most people know me. I just went there and stayed there for two to three years in which time I upgraded my life. Rebuilt one from scratch. Became a different person, more mature.

“When I was active on social media I used to write for attention. I had a gift but I was using it to get noticed. What I would do was, I would write a story, gain some buzz off it—Whooo yeah great—and I’d just ride on the top of that until it went down again. Two or three months later, I would get that hit again. I was writing for attention, for approval.

“I quit school to write. In 2011 I was in my third year of computer engineering at the University of Ghana. And I was miserable. I was learning things I didn’t care about to impress lecturers I didn’t like. But my parents thought it was a good potential job opportunity.

“I was depressed; I was sad; I was like ‘Ggaaaah.’ It’s something that some people still think was very stupid. I got up and I left school. I quit. Initially, I quit to change courses and read literature. But I was accepted for economics, which was weird. But my parents were like—you know parents—my parents thought I’d become the next Minister of Finance. So I went back, did two years of that, and around the time I lost that person I realized ‘you know what, I’m not happy here either.’

“I told my parents I was quitting to become a writer. They thought I was deluded to say the least. (Laughs) Friends told me I was stupid. People thought I was throwing my life away.

“But around the same time, I wrote an article for this American comedy site, Cracked.com. I’d been reading them since 2011. They have this policy where anyone can pitch an idea to them. I pitched an idea about plot holes I’d noticed in famous movies. And it got accepted. I knew a lot of people who wanted to write for Cracked but very few people got anything published. So I thought you know what, I could actually do this. In my mind, I was going to spend maybe a year or two years writing freelance for websites and companies.

“I wrote a few times for Cracked and got paid. My last article for them was January 2015. I had to make it work. It didn’t work out like I thought it would though. After doing two more articles for them I realized this is nice, this is comfortable, but I could get stuck here. I didn’t leave school to write for these people alone. So I stopped writing for Cracked and started writing a novel. Which has taken me two and a half years.

“I spent eight months on the first draft. Got to the endgame and realized what I was writing towards no longer worked. The ending. I spent a month trying to push it towards what I wanted.

“The most number of words I’d written in a single day ever in my life, was like three thousand words. It took me from nine a.m. to four p.m. I had a headache. I’d never written that number of words in a day.  I threw that scene out.

“In February 2015, I wrote a novella for a friend because she asked. The funny thing is she never saw it. When I finished it I grew attached to it and I just kept it. That was 26,000 words. I started it in February and finished it in March and then in April 2017, I began my novel. But exactly one week into it, I went Crrrk, got blocked.

“I realized everything I was writing was crap. I stayed blocked for four months. I went through another period of my evolution, which is when I stepped back, forgot everything I thought I knew, and learned how to write again. I learned to write from scratch. Everything I’ve mentioned up to this point was something I wrote for somebody. I wrote stories on my blog for an audience, I wrote stories for the Alchemist. I wrote the novella for the girl who asked for it. All I knew was how to write for people.”

GR: “That makes you very different from a lot of African writers who don’t seem to write for audiences, but for prizes or agents or particular markets.”

Nyameye: “When I finished this new novel, I realized that I am telling the story of the unhappiness and loneliness I felt when I stepped away from the world. In this case, I was writing for an audience of me. I was writing a story that I needed to write. I knew it would take a very long time for anyone who saw it to give me feedback and validation. I needed to learn how to write from writing’s sake. I needed to know how it ended.”

GR: “Charlie Gray doesn’t sound like an African name.”

Nyameye: “The novel is set in the west.”

GR: “Have you ever been there?”

Nyameye: "No, never. However. However. You may notice I have an accent which is not very African. My brother and I grew up in—I don’t want to say Western environment, but it was very Western. Soup is the word that comes to mind.

"When we were learning to speak, our cousins who lived in Europe came to stay with us. And we didn’t go out very much. We’re just not that kind of people. So we stayed home with them. They were the only people we knew, so we learned to speak like them. This was formative years, I was like three years old.  My parents would be off to work. We’d go to school, come back, and they would be the people we’d speak to. So that’s why I speak like this.”

GR: “What was your home language?”

Nyameye: “Twi. Both my parents are from the Asante tribe. In Ghana, you go through school with English. My mother worked at an NGO in social health. Poverty alleviation in rural areas. My father sold electronics. He had a shop. He was fortunate enough to be part of the electronics boom of the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. But now my dad is retired, my mother is retiring. I’m twenty-five; my father is sixty-three. I’m the last boy. I have four siblings two brothers, two sisters.

“My father had books in the house. He had books. I read Ken Follett when I was seven, The Third Twin. That’s the first time I knew what rape was. It was also the first time I realized a book could go beyond ‘Here’s the hero. Here’s the bad guy.’ The first time I came across an ethical dilemma. It’s about cloning the same person five times and then sending them to different parents.

“Swallows and Amazons was a really old book but I read it when I was eleven. That put the adventure bug in me. That was when I started writing little kids going on adventures. The Hardy Boys. I started writing mysteries. The Hardy Boys were everywhere. Enid Blyton. They were everywhere.”

GR: “The biggest influence on African science fiction is Enid Blyton.”

Nyameye: “I believe that. I actually believe that.

“Ice Station by Matthew Reilly—he’s not very popular, but Ice Station showed me that a book could be as blockbuster as a movie. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings showed me real adventure. The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper showed me what magic was, true magic.

“But the biggest influence on me that any writer has had was when I discovered Stephen King when I was twenty years old. I had come across a Stephen King novel before, when I was nine. It was the second book in The Dark Tower sequence, The Drawing of the Three. I didn’t understand it. I thought it was odd. And so in my mind I said, ‘You know what, this guy Stephen King, I don’t like it’. So I moved on to J.K. Rowling, whom I loved.

“But when I got older I loved The Shining, The Stand, and It. I tend to write very dark stories. I have a fascination with tragedy and death. Growing up, I thought, ‘Stories end well. The good guys win, the bad guys are defeated.’ Then there was Stephen King who by his own admission writes fucked up stories. But they were good. You can write anything and anything can be good. He gave me the confidence to write what I want to write, what I naturally need to work. No other writer has come close to the influence that Stephen King has had on me. Though a very close second is Neil Gaiman. He just writes so beautifully. So now I write dark things—somebody has to.

“There’s a culture in Africa that a career in the arts is a bad idea. We’re all pushed to be doctors, engineers, lawyers. Oh, they love lawyers. And doctors, they’re number one. Our parents don’t look at us and say, ‘Wow, you can draw. Do that. Wow, you can write.' They say, ‘Do something sensible and do this as a side hobby.’”

GR: “It’s the same everywhere. A little bit more here maybe as the structure seems to be that families are more able to demand things.”

Nyameye: “I admit it. I want to be successful. I want to be someone. But I hope to more than just Look money wow hoop—how to put this—to be able to come back and show that art is a viable career choice. If you commit your life to art you are not throwing it down the toilet.

“I’d love to have scholarships for artists. In Ghana, you hear of scholarships for engineers and doctors.   But nobody’s doing scholarships for musicians. No one’s sponsoring someone to learn how to draw. They say it’s a waste of time. And I hope in some small way I can start to change that. Or if it’s begun then I can help it.

“That’s a big part of why I write. I think things can change. I know very very very good writers who haven’t written anything in years because school got stressful and then they finished school and had to work and work got stressful. I know I’m fortunate because I had the luxury of quitting school and not having the luxury of not having my parents kick me out of the house because for many people that’s a very real possibility. I’ve quit twice and didn’t have my parents kick me out, but I’m an outlier in that regard. They do say, ‘To whom much is given, much is expected.’ So I hope to give something back.”

(Next)

This is what Kadi Yao Tay has to say about himself on one of his many online presences:

I’m the last star-hopping shinobi who’s passionate about African comics and is co-founder of Squid Mag, loves music, experiments with making his own and curates what he likes here, is a core member of akolabone, is excited by animation, occasionally writes for ACCRA[dot]ALT, supremeRights records and himself, and is stuck in a weird I’m-learning-to-code loop, still figuring out the labyrinth that is human interactions.

Kadi Yao Tay is a charming, slim, chuckling presence whose sentences duck and dive, sometimes losing or correcting themselves halfway. His talk is full of contemporary slang that had me assuming he had at least been partly educated in America. At the time of the interview, he had never been outside of Ghana. He seems to be a child of the internet: he speaks with the world.

He has written fiction and in another African generation no doubt would have been some kind of journalist-writer. Instead, Kadi is one of Africa’s leading exponents on African comics—which by now come in an array that would bewilder the sturdiest comiXology subscriber. Kadi is the force behind Squid Mag, a spectacular website devoted to African comics, games, and animation. He’s typical of the tech and business savvy creatives you meet so often across the continent.

Kadi Yao Tay is not his name.

Kadi: “Unfortunately, it’s Jason. Officially. But I don’t actually like it. (Chuckles) So I coined a name for myself. It means ‘light’ in Ewe (his maternal language). It’s inspired by the anime Death Note. There was a character in that. Smart-ass, a detective. I like him. So I modelled myself on him. Tah-dah!

“Death Note is noir but fantasy as well. Shingames can’t go to hell or heaven. They are stuck in between. They are death-reapers basically, and they have a notebook. When it’s your time to die you come up in it and they come up with creative ways for you to die. And you die.”

An enthusiast, Kadi spends some time summarizing most of the plot of Death Note. I listen patiently, then try to change direction by asking him if he likes comics. Well, duh.

Kadi: “I like comics but then when you start going off on DC, Marvel, I might get a bit lost because I just like some of the illustrations but I’m not deep into it, but when you talk about manga that’s where I shine, that’s what I really like because the stories don’t follow a formula. You get weird things happening and it makes sense because it’s manga. Anything goes. If it’s a good story and the characters are on point, then you’re good to go. I love it.

“I really like a book, so most of the time I’m not looking at the art, I'm just reading the words and I look at the art if I don’t understand what’s going on. Right now I’m reading New Born. It’s by Image Comics. I don’t remember the name of the illustrator or writer but it’s really brilliant. It’s like Star Wars meets Lord of the Rings. It’s really diverse. I don’t know if there’s a more diverse story than that. No! Actually, it’s called Saga.”

In 2017 Saga was just about my favourite comic of all time. I’d just given Dilman Dila a large collection of the first four album volumes of Saga. So we talk about Saga for some minutes. NewBorn is actually an African comic from PedaComics, a Nigerian comics company.

Kadi: “They had a successful Kickstarter campaign and they are going to launch a couple of issues soon. By the end of the year they should have two issues out.

“The other thing with manga and art is—because I read online all the time. That’s how I get hold of most of them. I’ve only seen about three manga in shops—DBZ, (Dragon Ball Z), Cowboy Bebop, and Naruto.”

GR: “Do you like The Comic Republic stuff [CR is another major Nigerian comics company]?”

Kadi: “I do. I really do. I like how glossy it is. What I love the most is their art. I think they do incredibly well with their art. It shines. I love Avonome. The reason I like it is all the fantasy involved. The other stories are very superhero-like. This is just magic.

Art from Avonome, drawn by co-creator Stanley Obende.

“I like that they don’t limit to it a very narrow representation of what African magic storytelling should look like. They have Black Gandhi; they have this purple, shapeshifting babysitter. Hispanic or something. I just like how diverse the comic is.

“I also like a character in Visionary—his story hasn’t been written yet—his name is Ijakadi (combat, struggle, or wrestling in Yoruba). Like he’s going to be a total badass and I’m really looking forward to him as well. He didn’t show in the first issue, but he’s in the promo art. And he has my name in there too, so it's, ‘OK, this is my guy’ (Chuckles).”

GR: “You want to write comics.”

Kadi: “I actually have one with Vortex. It’s called Hero Lomo. It’s the same idea as Hero Kekere [from Comic Republic, written by Cassandra Mark. You can see a video interview with Cassandra and other Comic Republic writers and artists on the YouTube channel 200 Africans]. You get the characters, make them kids and have them do funny things, imagining them as ordinary everyday Nigerians. I’m writing Issue 2, but I kinda hit a roadblock.

“When I wrote the first one it was a bit under pressure and I didn’t communicate much with the artist so what came out, I wasn’t too proud of it. So the second one, I want it to be really good and I’ve written three drafts. And I keep ditching things because I’m like ‘this isn’t working.’ And also because I’m shuffling all the other things. I have my day job and trying to run, I don’t know if you know this—Squid Mag. I’m trying to run that as well."

Shortly after this interview, Vortex seemed to go out of business. The website went down and stayed down. Recently in 2019, Vortex seems to have come back.

Kadi: “I can’t draw for love or money. But I plan out the panels. Eventually the artists are like, ‘I see your thought process, but the way you’ve planned the panels, it won’t work with my art.’ So they ask to take liberties. So I'm like, ‘Go with it. Do what you think makes sense.’

“But now I’m thinking instead of writing it panel by panel, I will write it like a script. I will just write the stories, then say to the artist, 'do your thing.'

“I read an interview with Brian [K Vaughan, author of Saga] about his process, and it was like that. ‘Hey Fiona, what do you think.’ So he says, ‘Imagine a big spider but very sexy with loads of tits,’ and I’m thinking, this process is fun for the writer. For the artist has to imagine what he’s writing.”

GR: “Have you spent any time in the States?”

Kadi: “No, I've been born and bred in Ghana. My parents are Ewe speakers, both from the same place. According to my mum, they started me off on English. I don’t find that hard to believe because in Ghana it’s strictly forbidden to speak local languages at school. And so most of the time I speak English. It sucks, yeah.

“So to be a model student I’m going to speak English all the time. I was one of those people. Even now my Ewe isn’t great.

“I was an OK student. I wouldn’t say good. I kept to myself. I did everything I was asked. Yeah, I followed the rules. Most of the time (Giggles).

“One minute, it was, ‘Mum, I want to be a scientist; oh mum, I want to be a doctor. Oh, I want to be a pastor. Oh, I want to play basketball.’ Along the way it was, ‘I want to be a writer,’ but then I wasn’t sure. For the longest time I just knew I wanted to be in media, but what, I didn’t know. I thought about journalism. Actually, that’s what everyone thought I was going to be.

“Right now I am a marketing intern with this startup. It’s calling itself the Zillow of Africa. Online real estate marketplaces. Yeah. I’m interning there. It will be over next month and I’ll see if I’m kept or not.

“Then on the side I work with Accra dot alt radio. It’s a cultural organization that produces the Chale Wote Street Art Festival in Jamestown every year and the Sabolai Radio Music Festival that happens some time toward December.

“We don’t have a permanent location. We alternate. I used to handle some of the social media. That was usually Instagram. During the festival especially. Either the assistant or the main social media guy. For the festival, me and my friend Masud write profiles for the participation artists. We’ve done that three years in a row. Then on the side I used to write a lot of articles for Accra Dot Alt.”

I offer Kadi a drink from the bar.

Kadi: “I’m agnostic, but I don’t drink. I’m off caffeine, off alcohol because of a health book I had as a kid, illustrated. It was really nice. ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that. Have an apple a day. Brush your teeth.’ I kind of stuck with it. After a while, my dad got into the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, and the book of wisdom says the same thing. So suddenly my Dad realized, ‘OK, I’m going to stop doing all these things.’ I stuck with it. I feel cool when I go out with my friends and it’s ‘OK, just give me a Coke. Give me a Fanta.’”

So I get him a Coke. And I ask him to clarify who the Asantes are. Nobody says they speak Asante.

Kadi: “No. It’s like ‘Hi, I’m British, I speak English. Hi, I’m American, I speak English.’ So the Asante kingdom. The Fantes are on the coast and the Asantes are inland. And the Asantes had the bigger kingdom, in the middle of Ghana very very central. Kumasi was their capital.”

GR: “And it got burnt.”

Kadi: “Ah, yeah, it’s had its moments.”

GR: “Where do the Ewe speakers fit in?”

 Kadi: “We are in the South Eastern side. We are originally not Ghanaians. With the partition of Africa we were part of Trans-Volga Togoland. So you’ll find our people in Togo and Benin. After we got independence there was a plebiscite. ‘Do you guys want to be part of Ghana or not?’ The majority of people voted to be part of Ghana.”

GR: “So you get Ewe people from Togo—but they speak French.”

Kadi: “Even in Benin. They have Asantes in Ivory Coast. When you ask people what are the major language groups they will say Akan, or Fante, but they don’t actually say Asante.”

Kadi tries to set me straight on the web of local languages. I’m not sure he succeeds, as it’s pretty complicated.

Kadi: “If you say Akan, you shouldn’t say Fante because Fante and Asante form one language group. They can understand what each other say. Fante and Asante are just dialects of Akan.

“I don’t speak good Twi. Twi is the language of the Asante. There is no one people called the Twi. And Fante is the language of the Fantes. Yeah that’s it. So the major languages are Akan, Ga in Accra, then you have Ewe and D’AgBane up north towards Somalia. They’re the Dagoumba. They are the major ethnic group. They have ties with the Mossi in Burkina Faso. They are all one people apparently.”

I ask him about being a prose fiction writer.

Kadi: “I definitely want to dabble in fantasy and some science fiction. But I hold up on science fiction. When I read science fiction they’re talking about space ships and all these hyperdrives, hyperjumps, all these technical terms. I don’t know any physics. It scares me so I hold off on trying to venture into space stories. So I’d rather talk about some aliens invading us and not so much about tech. Talk about the relationships, because that would be easier for me.”

GR: "Most writers are just inheriting tropes; they have no idea what a hyperdrive is. Really good thought-out, thorough world building SF is hard to find.”

Kadi: “I like fantasy. I know I started writing fantasy somewhere in GSS. About thirteen or fourteen, after I had seen Lord of the Rings for about the billionth time. Then I decided I want to write something like this. So it was pretty much me writing Lord of the Rings and giving it my own flavour. I never finished.

“Then in high school, it was more poems and poetry and being all corny. I’m awkward. I don’t have much attachment with girls. I didn’t write much for girls, but I had friends come to me to write stuff for their girls so I guess I wrote for girls at some point. I was a very unhappy, depressed boy. I was angry all the time. I was skinny. I was smallish. I was a nobody. So I would just write. I don’t read any of that stuff now, it depresses me, it’s really horrible. If I dislike someone I write about them but I don’t share it with them (Chuckles). Now I’ve changed. I’ve made an effort to be different.

 “I was lucky because I was in the class called General Arts. So we were studying French, religion, history, government or Akan language. Half the time I was in the visual arts class or in the library so I missed lots of lessons, just staying away from class as much I could.

“While I was in visual arts I made this friend Kobe, who could draw. He was a brilliant illustrator. And we kind of bonded. I think he introduced me to anime. I wasn’t crazy about cartoons and then it was like toof.

“And then we just sat down and tried to create stuff. None of the stories that we published have gone anywhere but it was fun. To just imagine things ... what if he had a superpower? So much fun. We set up a collective to publish comics and then sell merchandise on the back of it. We got stuck making T-shirts."

I ask about the finances of comics as African businesses. How do they make money when so much of their product is online for free?

Kadi: “The only thing I can see people doing is advertising and I don’t know if that’s sustainable. Unless the agreement with advertisers is that they show the ad to thousands of readers. If that’s how it works that’s yay for them, but if it’s on a commission basis then maybe yes.”

We talk about companies like Comic Republic, Vortex, Epoch, or Pedacomics, which are all based in Nigeria. You Neek Studios and Kugali have strong ties to Nigeria.

Kadi: “I like what’s happening in Nigeria. The scene is just very exciting. New players nearly every month. I used to collect all the comics but I lost all of them. My hard disk crashed. I don’t have them anymore. This just happened, just last week; a colleague at work was copying stuff to the hard disk so we could send it to the printer. The hard disk dropped and that was it.

“The ones that are important to me, that I lost, the ones I am crying over came from an online publisher called Comic Bandit Press. Before Vortex and Comic Republic, those guys were the go-to for comics.

Screengrab of the Comic Bandit webpage circa 2014

“I don’t know how I will ever get those comics again. That was my pride and joy. I’d say to people, ‘You don’t think we make comics here in Africa? Let me show you.’ And I’d pull out my hard drive and show them. It was awesome.”

For a talk I gave years ago on African SFF in 2014, I have some screen grabs of new wave Nigerian comics from the mid 2010s.

Two of Comic Bandit’s own titles, 2014 screen grab.

Spaceboy Nigeria home page, screen grab 2014

Spaceboy Nigeria’s informal online style, showing the SF series Africa Benson and the urban fantasy Tenugo, screen grab 2014.

Kadi: “Did you ever hear of Frank Odoi? [Ray Mwihaki in this series was another great fan of his work.] His comic Akokhan was the only comic we ever saw in Ghanaian newspapers. It was weekly on Saturday; it appeared in The Mirror. He moved to Kenya and that’s where he died, unfortunately. And so we in Ghana, we didn’t see other comics he did. Well, maybe I saw them but didn’t realize it was by him. Maybe I was too young.

Frank Odoi’s Akokhan

“I wish I had a lot of money. I’d just go to Kenya and buy the rights to Akokhan.

“And just reprint. I think it would be fun."

Kadi talks about another online supplier, a Kenyan app with a web presence called 254comics. It offers African comics from many different companies.

Kadi: “The only thing with them is you have to pay via PayPal and I don’t have a PayPal account. I see the titles and I try and find pages to download, but they put it all on 254.

“Ooo ooo ooo. There’s another comic I never mentioned it’s called Canary 7even. Their website was Canary 7even dot com. A good, good comic, about 2009 it was up. And it was about football, but not really football. They are all martial arts students. They train really hard. Two teams face off. I thought it was really good, one of the best.”

Here is Squid Mag’s feature about it.

Kadi: “Parodies that came out, really popular, one called Area. Ran about ten episodes. There's one in which Goodluck Jonathan gets called by Mark Zuckerbergy. It was really really funny.”

GR: “How does it feel being Ghanaian, so close to Nigeria?”

Kadi: “I am not overwhelmed, but I am impressed by Nigeria. I really respect Nigerians, their can-do attitude. If the whole continent was like that, it would be leagues ahead in terms of everything—technology, literature, arts, and sport. I think we’d be really really great. I’d love to go to Nigeria.”

GR: “Is there a tendency for some people to just migrate to Nigeria?”

Kadi: “I think so. I don’t know. I would understand the reasons to go to Lagos. There’s a bigger crowd. There’s more money. And I think there’s more appreciation for the arts in Lagos than in Accra. You know this stereotype still exists where parents think artists are a waste of time and money. So they won’t invest in them.”

GR: “It can be like that in Nigeria too.”

Kadi: “I think there is more money in Nigeria. And because there is also the competition, they are constantly improving. They are constantly upping the stakes. Whereas in Ghana there are some amazing artists yes, but I feel like everyone is in their own corner. They’re not really competing with each other, healthy competition of course. They are not improving as fast as they should.

“Maybe if there were more artists in this space, they’d really be pushing themselves. They are always on it. You know that they are easily replaceable so they are always on it; I like that spirit to make things happen.

“Sometimes I think I should have been born Nigerian. I love being Ghanaian but personally I could see that if you don’t push me, ech, I am complacent sometimes and I hate that, and I respect Nigerians for not being complacent, always moving. If they overshadow us, it’s because they’re working.

“When Kojo Laing died, it was sad that Ghanaian media wasn’t reporting on him. Honestly if it wasn’t for Twitter and my boss at Accra Adores, if he hadn’t tweeted about it, I would have no idea who Kojo Laing was. I read about him on Wikipedia. And I asked myself, ‘How is that I never heard of this guy?’ Someone goes, ‘You should blame your failed educational system.’ And I’m like, ‘OK.’ But some of my friends knew who he was. I like to read digitally. I’m not crazy about books. If you go to a bookshop, it’s all Christian books or textbooks.

“I make a deliberate effort not to write for the West. One of the ways I try to do that is—this might come off as racist but please forgive me. I saw a movie when I was a kid. The guy was just mentioning all the things that were bad are ascribed to black people. He starts with a gun. Why isn’t a gun a different colour other than black? In the English language when you say something is bad, it’s gloomy, it’s dark, it’s black. I don’t know how to describe someone’s temperament other than it’s gloomy or dark. I don’t know how else to say it.

“It had me wondering, what if I’d written in Ewe, which I’m not good at. I can read but writing is hard. What if I wrote in Ewe, would that change the way I wrote about these things? Would it make it more ... would it breed more racial equality or will it be the same thing just swapping whites for blacks?”

We talk about how differently African comic artists draw black people, particularly in line drawings. We move on from there to comics in general. I ask him what he will write.

Kadi: “Comics especially. That’s where I what to get into the most. In Ghana there aren’t that many people doing it, and I want to be one of those people doing it and be a force to be reckoned with in Ghana. And once I do that in Ghana I can spread to the rest of the continent.

“But at the same time I'm kinda taking on a producer role. Cause I’m seeing all these stories. And I’m like, ‘Hey these stories are way cool.' I mean I might as well invest in this as opposed to me trying to create something on my own. I might as well help that person push their work.

“Squid Mag started in 2015 after a friend, Kofi Asare Sydney, came back from his internships in either Burkina Faso or India, I don’t recall exactly which one. We met in the mall in 2014. He mentioned briefly that he wanted to produce a magazine that featured artists from Ghana and featured comics.

“Me and my friend from high school, Kobetaylor, who draws, had this thing going called Akolabone. We got kinda stuck making T-shirts. [There are still some Akolabone posts online.] We were getting some traction using our characters. We put our characters in Ghanaian settings. We’ve had three collections. We’ve mostly premiered them at the Chala Wote Arts Festival.

“Sometime in 2016 I was approached by Somto of Vortex and he wanted me to review Vortex comics on the Vortex website. So I started to do that but I wanted to do other comics as well. I started to do that on the blog.

“The idea was to print physical copies, but we started online because it was easier for us to do and get some following. Just the two of us pushing, pushing. In 2016 we grew, and we recruited people mostly from Chale Wote.

“I went to Tamale up north for National Service. (Ghana, like Nigeria, has a scheme in which young people after college go to a different part of the country to provide social service.) I was writing reviews while Kofi was down here.

“We had a comic called Generation Identity. It’s a Ghanaian comic by Jesu Robert Crentsil. What he was doing was shopping this particular comic around in schools with another friend, Dela Attikese. I got back from service and started writing more. So basically it was three of us.

“In 2017 we got more eyeballs cause we were reviewing comics from the big two, that’s The Comic Republic and Vortex. Then about two months ago (still 2017) Somto (director of Vortex) came to Ghana to do a version of something they do in Nigeria called Comics and Coffee, only we called it Comics and Smoothies. We were media partners. Really, me in particular helped put it together. I scouted the location.

“It was a success. A get-together of creatives, programmers, game developers, comic artists, animators. We just got together to talk about things we can do to move this industry forward in Ghana.

“Ever since then we’ve had more eyes on us. We have friends in Zimbabwe and Nigeria who do things similar to what we doing. Comics Exposed in Zimbabwe. And there’s Ziki Nelson and his Kugali database of comics, animation, and games.

“Our mission is to promote, archive, critique, and be the go-to for African creativity mainly in comics, games, and animation. So that’s us. We are a team of about ten. Just two girls, sadly.”

I met up again with Kadi a year later in Victoria train station, London. It was a great lunch with him and the Kugali team. Kadi was still bursting with enthusiasm for other people’s work.

In the course of the discussion, Kadi highlighted some great comics, many of which went on to be nominated for Nommo Awards ... including the superb Rovik, which is a Star Wars fanfic but set in an African-flavoured part of that universe, written by Yvonne Wanyoike with art by Salim Busuru. I asked Kadi what he’s enjoying most.

Kadi: “In Ghana not a lot of people are doing comics, which sucks. I think we have like three people, so that’s LagosTSghana.com.

“Leti Arts have been doing comics for quite a while. They got funding from an incubator. They recently launched an app called Afrocomix. A bit like what Kugali was doing before with the database. They have different comics on there.

“There’s a guy called Francis Brown. He made a film (Agorkoli, which won a prize as long ago as 2010) and he’s hoping to make that animated film into a comic. That should be happening soon. We have a literary festival in about two weeks and he’s talking about his comic."

Squid Mag recently reprinted an article about Francis Brown’s work. His animation studio AnimaxFyb Studios is an example of the world-class animation work coming out of West Africa.

 Kadi: “I know a few people who are doing stuff. We have guys doing these stick figure comics. They’re called Fiifi Kolliko.

“Big Brother Nigeria, that’s where all the action is. Like, yo. They just had Lagos Comic Con there. That was big. They had so many people coming through. I couldn’t go, unfortunately. But it looked good. So, so so so good."

“Lagos is the comic capital of Africa, I think. But elsewhere, they have these smaller studios. They have Juni Ba from Senegal.

“In Zimbabwe there’s a collective called Afro-Tokyo. Paper Angels is their comic. Their visuals are stunning. Story, I haven’t really dived in yet.

Cover for Paper Angels.

“In Uganda, I know one particular guy. His name is Louis Lubega. He runs a studio called Mongola or Mognolia. He has about two comics. One is Bucket and one is Olwatuuka. I think it’s the African comic with the most issues. And the most consistent. It’s like almost every month it’s put something out and not just a few pages. He posts his comics on Web tune."

 These and other Ghanaian names are mentioned in the magazine's recent article on Ghanaian comics, also in Squid Mag. See also: Ten African Comics online for free.

Since this Interview

Comic Bandit appears to be back, at least as a news page about comics.

And Vortex 247 returned in 2019 as well.

(Next)

(Previous)

The Guardian spurred his horse on to a full gallop through the narrow, winding streets of the old city, followed closely by five companions, leaving behind the chaotic sounds of iron clashing in vain against the thundering fire of the invaders. The four raced towards the outskirts of the city, to the edge of the desert, where they stopped to take a final look at the destruction that was being unleashed upon their beloved city.

The Guardian and his men watched in silence as arcs of fire erupted all across the northern sector of the city, cutting through every line of defence, the shrieks of the wounded rising together in a harrowing chorus of death. The men had no words to express the depth of their anguish. They had spent years preparing for this day; when the last remnants of the once-mighty empire would be crushed by the merciless onslaught of invaders, but to finally witness the inevitable unfolding was driving daggers into their hearts.

The raiders from the north had launched several attacks on the city in recent years, each one more devastating than the last. The defenders had barely managed to repel the onslaught—until now. Their swords and spears, ancient charms and amulets, were useless against the strange sorcery the foreigners possessed. Messengers had been sent to nearby Gao and Djenne, and as far as Agadez and Niani, in urgent requests for assistance from the allies of the empire. The few reinforcements that were promised never materialized. Meanwhile, the city’s defences steadily weakened to the point of collapse. Since last moon, most of the population had fled to neighbouring kingdoms in anticipation of this final assault, the Guardian’s wife and only child among their number. Those who remained had resigned themselves to the mercy of their new masters.

“The Writing in the Stars” from Lusaka Punk and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2015, reprinted in The Manchester Review.

Jonathan Dotse has a great stone face. He is laconic and clear-spoken, but rarely cracks a smile. But his calm thoroughness makes him one of the most impressive people I met in all the 120 interviews so far. I’d been trying to contact him for many years. As the founder of the blog www.afrocyberpunk.com in 2010, he was a pioneer, one of the first people alongside Ayodele Arigbabu, Ivor Hartmann, Jenna Bass, Lauren Beukes, and of course Nnedi Okorafor to know this stuff was going to take off. I emailed him many times but finally in 2017, I got a response from him.

He starts by saying that he’s not very good at emails and then he says something I’ve never heard before, but which I suspected for a long time—and which might explain why, actually, there is still not very much hard SF being written by Africans.

Jonathan: “I was working on a novel, which I started writing in 2009 when I was in Baltimore in the US. When I arrived in Ghana, the novel started to go through a transmutation process. I found the things I really wanted to write about. Before then I wanted to write sci-fi in the generic sense.

“I was not able to properly visualize an African context for the future in a realistic way. So my story was set outside Africa because I could not imagine sci-fi in Africa at the time.

“My characters were African but they were in the US because I could easily imagine the US in the future. But when I came to Africa, I was like blank. I found myself confronting all kinds of ideas that I’d never thought about. And I sort of wished that someone else would have to deal with those issues and not me. But I realized that nobody else was writing about this stuff. That was when I created the blog and said, ‘This is what I’m seeing.’

“I realized first of all that I had no real understanding of the dynamics in Africa at the time. My perception of Africa was what I was receiving from all over the world, that this was a continent in crisis, that there was nothing really exciting happening in Africa to inspire anyone. I’d spent the last three years (studying) in Canada not in contact with the continent and I guess that notion was reinforced.

“I’ve always been obsessed with science fiction. Those are the only books I read, the only movies I watch. Everything else to me is kind of underwhelming. But these ideas were all Western, by Western and Japanese writers, and had nothing to do with Africa. They had no understanding of Africa. That’s not their fault. They had no experience of Africa; they had nothing to say about Africa.

“So I had nothing to think about as regards the future of Africa. So when I started writing, it occurred to me as an African I should set it in Africa, but at the same time, I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t know what to extrapolate in terms of the future of Africa. But that only became clear when I returned to Accra. The period of being away helped me observe the change from a distance. I had lived in Ghana my whole life. It had been changing my whole life, but I didn’t really feel the magnitude of change until I left and returned; and I was really shocked by how much had changed in three yeas.

“The arts scene was way more vibrant than when I’d left. There was a lot more optimism, a lot more creativity. And that gave me the basis for being able to imagine the future.”

I talk about how little of the long text tradition of science fiction is available to many writers. Jonathan disagrees.

Jonathan: “This is a point that I made in one of my blog posts: even though we did not get the texts, we got the ideas one way or another. These ideas have been propagated across the mainstream media.”

GR: “Bastardized?

Jonathan: “Yes, very much so. We got the punk versions. It’s even more alien (to Africans) than normal Western media. Not only is it not based in Africa, but it’s not based in any time or space that we are familiar with. It requires Africans to make two leaps of faith just to be able to follow the narrative. You can’t follow the narrative if you don’t really buy the premise.

“The first real epiphany that I had was literally on the flight returning to Accra after three years. I was thinking about my story, and life in general. I was sitting by the window—I love sitting by the window in a plane just to see it landing and taking off.

“The landing was at night. I could see the lights of the city. It was unbelievable to me at the time because I did not imagine that Accra was so, like, sprawling, a sea of light. I was in awe. Just in terms of seeing from an aerial view what was happening. I doubt it was the same view when I left. It was much more impressive. In that moment I began to realize that I could find a story here.

Accra at night photo by Kofi Pong.

“Throughout the course of reintegrating into Ghanaian life I began to find inspiration everywhere, every day. It just kept building and building until I had to make a blog post about it because I had to tell someone.

GR: “Is it still up?

Jonathan: “Yes it is. Right now, I’m not entirely proud of it. I think my worldview has grown since, but what I wrote then was sort of the visceral sensation I was getting, my experience into a short piece to get people excited about the future of Africa."

The earliest posting, “The Future of African Science Fiction," is still up on the AfroCyberPunk site, and is dated April 2010.

Not the science fiction of your grandfather or the Foundation of your Asimov, no. Africa lends herself to the dystopian gloom of failed states, the iron rule of corruption, cartels snaking cold fingers into the upper echelons of government, and high tech gangs of disillusioned youth. Follow her streets into dark melancholy and taste her despair, the bitter and the sweet simmering together to form her unique flavor. Follow the trails of waste spilling out from her gutters, follow them down to the banks of her industrial empires, her charred forests, and damp mines. You will not find your Jedi warriors here, but you might run into some street thugs or hackers, scammers, drug dealers, con men and women, street children, ritual murderers, wandering evangelists preaching hope and doom. The only Force here is hard currency, and it’s dark on both sides. Embrace her reality.

Africa is cyberpunk.

In 2010, African science fiction was basically a couple of superhero comics along with Ayodele Arigbabu trying to pull together Lagos 2060. In 2009 the film Pumzi had spun out of left field. Ntone Edgabe had brought a more experimental spec-fic consciousness to Chimurenga, especially the double issue 12/13 on Black Technology in 2008. Nnedi Okorafor had won the Wole Soyinka Award in 2008, but Who Fears Death was yet to appear. Jenna Bass had not published Jungle Jim. Ivor Hartmann’s StoryTime had not really got going. Dotse was a stone cold pioneer.

Screengrab of www.afrocyberpunk.com in 2014.

Jonathan: “For me it wasn’t so much of computers and programming that I saw, but the dark side. And that is why afrocyberpunk, because cyberpunk is a very realist kind of fiction, in the sense that sci-fi is utopian. Some people would say cyberpunk is dystopian, but I disagree. I think it accurately describes the forces of the world we actually live in, not the world we want to live in.

“Cyberpunk is all about how corporations subvert state power. It's about how people on the streets end up using technology for things that it was not designed for and taking the power from the creators of the technology by any means necessary.

“The complex dynamics in which society interrupts the obvious trajectory of the technology and takes it in a direction that no one expected. I was seeing a lot of that in Ghana.

“I don’t know if you are aware of Agbogbloshie [A huge e-waste garbage dump in Ghana, described in this article in The Guardian]. It’s a recycling area. People call it a dump, but more recycling goes on there. Things are dumped, things are recycled. There’s a lot of cases of people getting hardware like old hard drives and extracting information that is very sensitive information. For example, US government servers have been found there with sensitive data. No one in the planning department would have foreseen young Africans rifling through state secrets. (Chuckles) But that’s what is happening. Nobody thought the chain of consequences through.

“Most people are very aware of cyberfraud. To be honest, that’s more enticing to any young person growing up than becoming, say, a programmer because you can make so much more money. Way more money, in a much shorter period of time.

“The best and the brightest are going to do that because that’s the most appealing option.”

The first chapter of his novel was excerpted in Jungle Jim in 2011. But it is just an excerpt and the story breaks off abruptly with a leap.

Jonathan: “I love ending with cliffhangers. It [that chapter] will be in the novel but in a revised version. I find the world keeps changing a lot. All the time. It’s the reason I haven’t finished the novel.

“I’m always thinking about the novel and rewriting it in my head—the story, I’m rewriting the story. The writing process is a bit convoluted. I got so far into worldbuilding that I lost track of the story. I’m now focused on the story and making it more compelling.

“I’m also running a company, a VR company full time. But my schedule is extremely flexible and I plan my time. The truth is I’m not a very good storyteller. I think I’m a better writer than I am a storyteller. And for me the most important thing is getting the story right. The writing is the easy part. I’ve probably written about five novels worth of storylines in the course of writing this one.”

Jonathan attended the 2015 Caine Prize writing workshop held in Ghana that year, run by Leila Aboulela and Zukiswa Wanner. It was a distinguished year that included Efemia Chela and Diane Awerbuck from South Africa, Timothy Kiprop Kumutai, and Akwaeke Emezi, who went on to win the 2019 Ilube Nommo Award for their novel Freshwater. The workshops contribute stories to a year’s anthology that also includes the nominated stories. That year it was entitled Lusaka Punk and it included Jonathan’s story “Written in the Stars.”

Jonathan: “That was where I got to meet Kojo Laing [author of Woman of the Aeroplanes and Major Gentil and the Achimoto Wars who died in 2017 about a month before this interview]. That was incredible. I was so sorry. I didn’t know about it until you told me. The rumour was that Binyavanga was going to do a new edition of his work. But then Binyavanga got ill. I don’t think Kojo would have cared either way. That was my impression. For him the whole joy of it was just doing his work.”

For a series of tributes to B. Kojo Laing, check out this piece in the Johannesburg Review of Books.

Jonathan: “We were in this beautiful resort, Elmina, for two weeks with nothing to do but write and meet other writers in the evening and discuss our writing. I’ve always been a solitary writer, so companionship and being with other writer-spirits was very interesting and rejuvenating. I don’t think I would have been able to think of that story in any other environment. I felt more relaxed. I was also horse-riding in the resort, which gave me the seeds of the idea. I really enjoyed writing it. Did you pick up any cyberpunk elements in the story?”

GR: “I didn’t really. I thought at the opening, “Oh God, this is sword and sorcery.”

Jonathan: “You’re not the first person to have such a response (chuckles). And I typically don’t read such stories, so I don’t blame you. I think I almost did that on purpose. ‘I hate this kind of stuff but finally I get to write it myself and just take it in a different direction from where it usually goes.’

“I went to college in Canada. My cousin lives in Baltimore so I’d spend holidays there. I was majoring in Artificial Intelligence my first year, but Psychology for my second two years. It was in Windsor, Ontario. It came about randomly. I was trying to get out of Ghana by any means necessary.

“Windsor had a recruitment drive and my high school organized a trip to go to a talk. They gave me a scholarship to go. Diversity is sort of their thing, trying to corner the market. It was a very interesting campus for that reason. I got to meet people from many different places.

“I had a good time some of the time. Some of it was bad. I had a kind of existential crisis. I always had difficulties socializing and integrating into normal social life. I went to a lot of parties but didn’t enjoy it as much as I expected to. These days I’m perfectly fine being on my own.

“I am told that I argue too much and that I apply logic too rigorously to political discussions. It’s just the way I am. I get into political arguments all the time.

“I don't find Ghanaian politics frustrating. I know what to expect. I just don’t engage with those systems. It’s pretty clear to everyone what are the problems of society. But not one perceives they have the power to solve them. The whole political process of uniting around a person is flawed. We are all capable. We can all solve the problems.

“When I was a kid, I read encyclopedias. Science was my favourite thing—anything to do with science I found fascinating. I was pretty much a walking encyclopedia.

“What else did I read? I’m sorry to say, a lot of the Hardy Boys (Chuckles) from not having access to much else. One of my main influences was this book that I bought on a ship when I arrived back in Ghana. It was in Accra port, Tema. It’s this Christian ship doing charity and selling books and stuff. It’s like a bookshop on a ship. The boat still shows up. We went there on a family trip. Nothing caught my attention except this virtual reality book. There are no coincidences.

“That was probably my first sci-fi book that I owned or possibly the first sci-fi novel I read. It was by William Kritlow, who was this Christian writer, and it was like a series of three books for young adults. This boy and his sister who have an uncle who has this virtual reality, he works for the US government in virtual reality. There is a mysterious illness going around and they have to find the cure inside this VRC nation that their uncle created.

“That was a life-changing experience. The book is probably somewhere very tattered. I actually remember the book very clearly. I think about it frequently. I still remember a lot of the technology the book describes, some of the mechanisms, and I’m still impressed by the storytelling. Somehow even more so because it’s a Christian book.”

GR: “A book that is a Christian book might not be accorded the same respect.”

Jonathan: “Yeah, and I sense that as well. And I could clearly tell there was an agenda to spread the Gospel but it was not as bad as some I’ve seen in Christian literature. In fact it was very very minimal. I was impressed by that as well.

“I read a lot of the Bible, that’s for sure, cover to cover several times. I didn’t have a choice—there was not much else to read. I was in a religious family.

“My favourite chapter is Revelation, which is the sci-fi part of the Bible. So is Daniel, which has some sci-fi elements. He saw the future. He saw flying chariots. A lot of Biblical scholars say that the ancients knew what was going to happen. I find it interesting either way. The Bible has some great storytelling. I think it predisposed me to epic narratives.”

GR: “‘The Writing in the Stars’ is pretty epic.”

Jonathan: “The novel I’m writing is even more epic. That’s the whole point of it. It was always meant to be a big novel in a modern format.”

GR: “The excerpt ‘Virus’ starts out with two tough street girls and they’re involved in some dodgy technology, but I’m not sure I would call it epic.”

Jonathan: “The girls get involved in something much more complicated than they realize initially. And there are two other main characters so the novel is three stories in one, interwoven. One of the strands is over a person’s lifetime.

“I think we are moving towards a future where the power of traditional authorities is going to be weakened and the power of the individual will rise to primacy. And that’s what the story is about.

“We need each other so it’s unavoidable that we have mutual interdependence to survive. Marxism doesn’t focus on the autonomy of individuals. The latent power of individuals who decide to work together.”

We talk about what kind of future it might be: no alien invasions, no time travel, but certainly driverless cars.

Jonathan: “Africans would not like driverless cars but governments might force them for safety reasons. I think there would be a lot of resistance mainly from the transport unions.

“It most certainly will be safer. It’s not if they go wrong, it’s when they go wrong, but accidents will still not be on any scale like what we have now. Human beings are bad at certain tasks. We are great at certain things. But as soon as we have machines who do them better than us there’s no argument, certainly when life and death are involved.”

I try to get more information about Jonathan’s biography.

Jonathan: “I have one brother. He is a writer as well and a filmmaker. He’s just starting out. My um was —is—a pastor.”

GR: “Fearsome.”

Jonathan: (Chuckles, agrees). “Uh-huh. My dad was an accountant. He passed away in 2011. It was quite disorientating. I mean, to be honest we were not that close. He was a good guy but we just weren’t, so ...”

“My mum doesn’t read my stuff. She knows I write but she doesn’t find it ... you know.”

GR: “At least she knows you’re running a company.”

Jonathan: (Chuckles.) “Even that was a struggle for a while. ‘Why don’t you get a job? I’m like, ‘I’m running a company,’ and she’s like, ‘You can get a job on the side.’ (Chuckles). That’s cause, you know, we were struggling for a while. I was struggling financially. I have a business partner.”

Jonathan’s company makes VR films mostly of events. I ask him who his customers are.

Jonathan: “Currently universities, the British Council, hopefully UNICEF very soon. Actually I have a project I can show you. It’s going to be premiering at the Sheffield documentary film festival—Sheffield Docfest in June. It’s called Spirit Robot.

“It’s a documentary about a street art festival that happens in Accra each year. It’s a VR documentary. It was made with a 360 camera and the film was shot on location. It actually takes you in VR through the festival. It is an individual experience. It requires some hardware.”

Jonathan with a VR device holding a phone.

He slots his phone into a headset viewer. I put it on and suddenly I am in an Accra arts festival, walking around the exhibits, turning right around to look at pictures and people as they walk past. It’s more like time travel than anything else—with ghost tables and chairs to stumble into when I walk blind to the real world.

We talk about technical stuff for a bit, about getting locked out of Google and Apple because you are in Africa. He lights up a cigarette in the hotel café and nobody minds.

Jonathan: “I’m an addict. To cigarettes. For sure. Isn’t that the point? You can’t really enjoy cigarettes unless you are already addicted. I don’t enjoy vaping. First of all I don’t get the flavour of the vape. I deliberately chose to be an addict.”

GR: “Wow.”

Jonathan: “I was aware. I was aware. It’s just experience. You can’t understand anything until you have experienced it. You can only have an approximation of it. So, yeah, to truly understand what it means to be addicted.”

GR: “So you’re going to go through hell getting un-addicted so you can understand that?”

Jonathan: “No I’m not. It’s a one-way street I think.”

GR: “Well, who wants to get old?”

Jonathan: “I want to live forever if possible, though. It’s not smoking that is going to prevent me living forever. But living beyond the human life span, it’s not smoking that’s going to stop me.”

GR: “Do you think they will be able to download an intelligent simulacrum of your personality and that will keep you alive?”

Jonathan: “No. It’s not going to take a simulacrum to keep my personality alive. One thing, It’s not a copy of myself I’m interested in. I’m interested in staying alive. Having a copy of myself does not benefit me. It benefits the world but not me (Chuckles). I’d have to actually stay alive. It’s the only way it works for me.”

GR: “You’d have to arrest ageing. You wouldn’t want to stay eighty-five forever, so it would have to be young.”

Jonathan: “Arrest it or postpone it, yeah.”

GR: “Would five hundred years be enough?”

Jonathan: “For a start, yeah. I don’t know if I would gamble five hundred years. Who knows what’s going to happen in that time?”

GR: “So if the sun exploded, you wouldn’t want to be left on a frozen cinder. You wouldn’t want to be actually immortal and not be able to be killed.”

Jonathan: “I just want to have a choice about when I go. Practically speaking I would not want to go until I have seen everything. I think it’s possible I want to be that guy in the café at the end of the universe. I think the end of the universe would be the beginning of something else.

“I’ve been following a lot of scientific research. There’s a possibility that awareness extends into other dimensions. One of Feynman’s theorems can be resolved with a much simpler crystalline structure. The way of calculating the mass of quantum particles was resolved by a much simpler theory. So we might have progress there too.”

GR: “That’s the core science fiction dream. Immortality of the species, immortality of the person.”

Jonathan: “That’s the reason we’re alive. If we could narrow it down to any one reason it’s immortality.”

By now it’s night so we head out to a bar in Osu, a more central part of Accra. The prices are astonishingly high—Accra is a tourist city. We have a very serious, even ponderous discussion about African writing.

Jonathan: “I’m trying to make a clean break from the publishing industry. They have a kind of power they are abusing. They’ve been ruined by capitalism. It’s no longer about art, it’s about money.

“It’s pretty simple. The industry doesn’t see a market in Africa. They are not interested in selling books to Africa and that is reflected in the kinds of books they are publishing.

Since this interview, I think Jonathan has been proved right. More and more young African writers are focussed on selling their work to Western venues—which means language and context are subtly (and not so subtly) slanted towards a Western readership. The result is an African literature that is not necessarily for Africans in the first instance.

“As a result, there’s not a lot of African fiction that I find interesting. I only really enjoyed Wole Soyinka. I did think one of Clifton Gachagua’s stories was brilliant (including ‘No Kissing the Dolls Unless Jimi Hendrix is Playing’).

“I’m most impressed by what is called magic realism. I don’t see that big a difference between it and SF. They are both about things that are out of the ordinary. Anything we don’t understand becomes magical or mystical. Whoever understands the mystical can control the narrative. Something that distinguishes Africa is the ability to unify the whole.”

A long conversation follows. I say that people like Tade Thompson, Chikodili Emelumadu, and Kiprop Kimutai talk about the African ability to let supposedly contradictory views of the universe co-exist. We talk about the core idea of the dialectic in the West, how it is about opposing opposites that resolve themselves into a new synthesis. In the African view, it could be that the dialectic, the idea of conflicting views challenging each other into synthesis, doesn’t apply.

Jonathan keeps seeing in traditional ways of life, the Igbo particularly, a political and cultural alternative to capitalism and globalism, one without leaders, about individuals taking charge for themselves, coming together into communities. I talk jokily of a Manifesto for Unscientific Socialism. My recorder’s memory is full, so I start taking notes.

Jonathan: “I disagree. There has not been enough effort to scientifically validate autonomous units (individuals acting in concert).”

Jonathan’s maternal language is Ewe, spoken by both his parents. However, he says that he speaks Ewe badly for family reasons he didn’t want to go into, at least not on the record.

Jonathan: “In school, local languages were not allowed. That’s a by-product of colonialism. Basically colonization never ended. Power was handed to a local elite whose mindset is one that values Western modernity. I know some of these people. They think they are best and the brightest. They think most Africans can’t be saved. But whoa! That’s backwards. We had a culture.

“You have to remember that Africa is isolated. Stayed isolated for thousands of years, relatively, and that means we had time to become very different from the rest of the world. And very different from each other. Now the pull seems to be in the other direction.”

Since this interview, Jonathan has been hard at work in the world of digital arts. His novel has not been finished.

(Next)

(Previous)

Pearl opened her eyes. She was not sure what woke her up. Was it her screams or the alarm clock chiming 6 in the morning? Or the smell of fresh human blood that always filled her nostrils whenever she woke up after having this same nightmare? Yawning she picked up the clock, stopped the alarm and threw it among her books and clothing that were all struggling for personal turf on the bed beside her sweating self.

She would find it when she returned in the evening. After all, that has been the evening ritual: going through clothes and books, in search for her alarm clock, and she always found it. Now she had to make herself some of that strong Chinese herb tea Mama sent to her a week ago. The thing always worked magic on her system; particularly on mornings when she woke up after that recurrent nightmare that left her hungry for fresh blood. She walked over to the window and drew back the curtains. Then she picked up her medical journal and pen lying among other books and clothing in the only sofa in the bedroom.

As she boiled water for her tea she wrote in her journal. This time she had not seen the man or woman’s face. But the last time, the last time was about four days ago. She recorded the date and time. She had seen their faces. The man’s was covered in blood from the woman. Sighing, she placed the journal on the kitchen counter and prepared her tea. Then forgetting the journal on the counter, she walked out with her tea.

Savior Korankye was watching her from his apartment window as she walked to her car ...

From the opening of the novel A Quarter Past Midnight

Faith Ben-Daniels treated me with immense generosity when I arrived in Kumasi, Ghana, to interview her—welcomed me to her home, gave me dinner, and insisted on paying for my hotel room. Later she was my guide and companion to a visit to the Asante royal palace (sadly a phone malfunction meant many of my Ghana photographs were lost). Faith teaches literature and seemed during my two-day visit to be surrounded by students who showed enormous affection and respect for her. The recording of the interview is punctuated by thunder and ends with the sound of hammering rain.

Her work intrigued me because it seemed so firmly in the genre of spiritual realism, only the spirituality is Christian.

Faith was, at the time of the interview (2017), the author of two published novels: A Quarter Past Midnight and Mimosa. In A Quarter Past Midnight both Christian and traditional beliefs are shown to work. A character we care about, Pearl, seems to have something to do with a murder, but we can’t think at first what it might be.

Faith: “Pearl’s possessed by a demon. The evil in this story rises out of the tradition of once you are a woman and are married you must have children. When you cannot have children it becomes a serious problem and you must try every possible means to have children. In this story Pearl’s mother has sought the help of a deity in her hometown of Kofiase (a city two hours north of Kumasi) to help her conceive. The agreement is, ‘We are going to give you a spirit child that is actually a wife of the Gods. When she is eighteen you must bring her back to serve in the shrine of the Gods, a particular shrine in the Kofiase area and it's called Kyenaman (the “Ky” is pronounced like “ch”).’

“The mother agrees to the contract. Then she gets pregnant, she gets Pearl, and Pearl grows up to be a lovely pretty girl, interested in school. She wants to become a psychiatrist. The mother is beginning to forget her bargain with the deities. And that’s where the problems begin. It is believed when you don’t fulfil your part of the bargain with these deities, they come and take by force. So they begin to possess the body of Pearl.”

GR: “A man attacks Pearl badly and she doesn’t remember but her friend and her mother do. She becomes strong and breaks his wrist. It’s like she has super powers. But she doesn’t fight for good.”

Faith: “She’s not getting those superpowers to do good. Just to defend herself. Which shows that she’s possessed. Once the spirits within feel threatened, they react.”

GR: “You have three evil characters in the book. You have Ato, the rapist ...”

 Faith: “Who kills his wife.”

GR: “We have Felix, his friend who we are told is good. And Oscar, who we are told is evil. But he’s the one who says, ‘You must go to the police. Your wife was a bitch but she didn’t deserve it.’”

Faith: “Let me begin with Felix, who is a representation of good and the odd man out amongst the three. In a way, he is like the voice of reason or the conscience that those two need, a walking conscience. If he’s not there they would degrade. What happens is that he doesn’t fully control them. He has a soft spot for them and looks away when they are doing evil. He already knows Ato has killed his wife. I brought in a bit of a supernatural connection there. Like someone who is a natural psychic, that he can see things and feel things, though I don’t say that specifically. He could look into your eyes and look into your very soul. He is expecting Ato to do the right thing.

“As for Oscar, he is pure evil but very intelligent. Evil excites him. He will not initiate evil, but the minute it is initiated he is there to support it all the way.

“Ato is just a confused and angry man, who made wrong choices because he followed his heart. He really loved Aratana, but he’d made a mistake. Instead of accepting that he made a mistake and moving on, he went on to make a graver mistake.”

GR: “The dreams everyone keeps having: Pearl keeps having dreams of a terrible event. Then the Reverend starts having dreams of her coming to him. What’s the role of dreams?”

Faith: “Personally growing up I had this belief that the physical world is planned from the spiritual. Whatever happens in the world has been planned in a spiritual sense. And that spiritual sense can only be visited in dreams. Once the physical body falls asleep, the spirit is active.”

GR: “What is the nature of evil in the book? A Christian might say we have all fallen. At one point you talk about the smell of evil. I don’t understand your sense of evil.”

Faith: “The sense of evil I was trying to represent has to do with getting out of what are the society’s norms, one. Two, turning against humanity in general. I perceive killing another person as turning against humanity. And three, I represent the Ghanaian society’s definition of evil, and evil is quickly represented in the traditional deities.

“The reason why evil is represented in the traditional deities is that it is believed they do not forgive. A bargain is a bargain. The traditional worship does not have the Christian way of, 'you can kill a man today, go to a church and say "Father, I have sinned," and your sins are forgiven.' Within the traditional deities, you kill a man, you are killed.”

GR: “For you the traditional deities are a real thing. You would not dismiss them.”

Faith: “No, I would not dismiss them. Because people still follow that way of worship, and it still works for those who believe. For instance, we have here in this region a town called Antoa, and the river is called Antoa Nyama. That river is worshipped not only by the people there, but by people from other areas. It is believed that the river is feminine and very aggressive.”

“So when someone is accused of doing something wrong, people from that area are quick to curse you, using the river. You see people go to the Palace (at Kumasi) and say ‘I was cursed by the river. So my feet are swollen, my tummy is swollen.’ And you see them actually die if they do not appease the river.

GR: “So for you Christian belief is something that controls the unforgivingness.”

Faith: “Yes. The Christian belief in a way comes in as a better alternative, because it has the way of forgiveness, that doorway that leads to forgiveness. Forgiveness that you do not have to buy or pay for in any way. Yes. Because when you are cursed by this river, you have to pay to have the curse reversed.”

GR: “At least you can pay to have the curse reversed.”

Faith (Laughs): “At least you can pay to have the curse reversed.”

GR: “A Quarter Past Midnight reminds me of Nii Parkes’s Tail of the Blue Bird. In both books a modern detective comes in to investigate a crime with links to spiritual beliefs.

Faith: “Detective Emmanuel comes in because a crime has been committed, the cold murder of a woman left on a deserted highway. But there are challenges. The police force is not technically equipped to actually investigate using forensic science. But he’s following the story of the woman who is dead and the story of people around her. He gets a warrant to search Pearl’s house. And he actually finds out who kills who and why. The detective does not really find out that what happened is something supernatural. The lawyer called Saviour follows the story and finds the supernatural connection.”

We talk some more about the plot of the novel—but let’s avoid spoilers. I ask Faith if her other two books deal with traditional or Christian belief.

Faith: “Not really. Mimosa just takes on the spiritual belief in the connection of dreams and the supernatural. The novel is based on a real building that collapsed, the Melcom Stores. I don’t remember the year. The Melcom Stores collapsed, killing a number of people.

“The characters have dreams about what each other are going through in the physical world. A husband and wife have a spiritual link. The husband Kobby was caught in the building collapse. His wife Yaa feels whatever he feels down there under the collapsed building, she feels. And he also feels what she feels.

“In the first chapter when Yaa sees the building collapsing, she knows her husband is in there. She runs towards the building and a group of men pin her down to stop her. Kobby is trying to escape and all of a sudden he can feel many hands pinning him down like his wife.”

GR: “The many hands also show up in A Quarter Past Midnight.”

Faith: “The many hands represent forces that try to suppress you whenever you try to take a step forwards. They hold you back; they put you down. These might be supernatural forces but also politics as well, the politics in Ghana.

“The third novel I am still writing has a supernatural connection in dreams, spirits, and all of that, entitled Gray Skies. I’ve been working on it for ... it’s hitting its third year. And I still haven’t finished it. I’m so busy these days, that’s why.”

GR: “You’re a teacher, yes? I find teaching is a bit too much like writing.”

Faith. “The barriers to writing. (Laughs) I prefer writing in the evenings after the day’s work has been done. But when I’m so tired I can just write one sentence and my hands can no longer type. So I have to stop. And all the next day and the next, and it’s taking more and more time to complete. I personally do not have a block on what I want to write. I always know what I want to write. The challenge is time, combining it with work and family and all of that.

“I teach African and World Literature at the University of Education, Winneba, Kumasi Campus.   The main aim is training people to become teachers. Most of the programmes are tailored towards education. There is a creative writing course in the Department of Language Education and it falls under the English Unit.”

GR: “What books does it cover?”

Faith: “In African literature the focus is on postcolonial literature. The course is split, the first part being the earlier generation of African writers, the second part being contemporary writers writing about Africa from the continent and in the diaspora.

“There’s lots of activities, teaching, the university. Basically we teach all year round. This is the first time in my six years of working with them that we are having a break. Our regular students are leaving in May, and our sandwich students are not going to come until July. I intend to use this break to finish Grey Skies.

“We used to teach all year round. And there are other activities. I hold yearly undergraduate student seminars where they present academic papers on writers they have researched. So it’s a yearly event. They look forward to it.”

We talk for a while about the books Faith teaches in her course. The information box at the end of this part lists them. I then ask her what books she read as a child.

Faith: “I fell in love with books at a very young age, probably about seven or younger because my mom used to buy books for us. I remember our favourite book was Sugar Girl (by Kola Onadipe). I’m still looking for Sugar Girl, so if there is anyone out there still remembers it and who can get it to me I would be so grateful.”

[Kola Onadipe’s first book, The Adventures of Souza, was published in 1963. Some twenty books followed, most of them for children. Many of them have spiritual realism or fantasy elements. In this first book a young boy joins a cult and meets a magician. In Sugar Girl (1964) a young girl leaves home and has a series of adventures, including facing a witch. In The Magic Land of Shadows (1970) an abused girl finds a magic land hidden in shadows. Many of Onadipe’s books were published by the African Universities Press in their series UBE Reader Boosters. Later, his work was published by Natona Press.]

Faith: “Mom would to read it to us every evening, read a few pages and tell us that she would continue the next evening. Sometimes she’d be like, ‘Oh I’m busy, I’m tired, go to bed.’ So I decided to pick up Sugar Girl and read it for myself. I remember actually finishing Sugar Girl.

“And then I remember she bought us two books. I remember the books so well because they were beautiful. One was blue and the other was red with glossy cover. In those days glossy covers weren’t really popular. What I remember in one was a poem ‘I Am Mr Crocodile.’ The crocodile begins to list the rivers in Nigeria. She would read it to us even when we were around the house doing chores. She would start, ‘I Am Mr Crocodile.’ I don't know where those books are now. I can’t even remember the titles.

“I think I wrote my first full story when I was nine. It started as a school project. In the class, we all decided to write one book.  So we all contributed the sentences and the story line. You know kids. (Chuckles). We got to the point when there was a huge argument: ‘I want this in,’ and the other says, ‘No, it’s not good enough.’ The project collapsed. I went home and decided that I’m going to write my own. I started it and I finished it.

“By nine, ten, eleven, I was reading a lot of the Enid Blyton series. I was already reading a lot of Mills and Boon, Harlequin and Silhouette. By twelve or so I started reading James Hadley Chase’s novels. Then I think the first time I read a Sidney Sheldon, I was in junior high school. I graduated from Sidney Sheldon to John Grisham. So for a while I think I was reading African writers because that’s what my mother used to buy for us. One person I remember reading from a very young age was Amma Darko, her novel Beyond the Horizon. She was a Ghanaian woman who went to live in Germany. She wrote the book in German and then it was translated into English.

“And then I read the woman from Botswana, Bessie Head, who wrote Maru and When Rain Clouds Gather.

“I remember reading a novel as a teenager entitled Possessed by a Ghanaian writer, Atu Yalley. It combined science and traditional belief as well as Christian belief. In the end the problem is solved by traditional belief. Unlike A Quarter Past Midnight where the problem is solved by Christian faith. That novel made a huge impression on me as a teenager back then.”

GR: “Was your mom a teacher as well?”

Faith: “Yes, she was a teacher and then later on a kindergarten teacher. I think she spent more time as a kindergarten teacher than a primary school teacher. So she was the one who taught me how to read, taught me my first words, the two-letter words, and my alphabet.

“Her own language was Twi. I spoke English as a child and learned Twi as an adult. I think the reason is that I was born in Nigeria and where we were staying there were a lot of languages and there wasn’t one they could choose to learn so they said, ‘OK everybody, speak English.’

“We moved to Ghana when I was about to start secondary school. I was just about fifteen years old. I used to miss Nigeria, but I don’t any more.  I have a sister. She stays in the US.”

GR: “When and how did you get published?”

Faith: “When I came to work here at the university in 2011 I was sharing an office with a man who was now my boss. In a conversation I told him, ‘I’ve written a couple of novels but I haven’t published them.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, I have this young lady, a daughter of mine in another town who is a bookseller and she’s just told me getting into publishing.’

“She was looking for young people who are writing, so she can publish and market their books. And I said, ‘Let me call her.’ But he called her and she drove all the way to the campus and we spoke. And that’s how the relationship started. She published A Quarter Past Midnight and she published Mimosa.

“The first time someone told me that I was good was when I was a child writing children’s stories in junior high school. It was said to me by a volunteer couple from America, Mr and Mrs McCoy. I gave them my story in an exercise book and Mrs McCoy came to class a few days later saying, ‘Oh, Faith has written a story and it’s beautiful.’ That was the first time.”

I talk about the validation Malawian writers get, as young as sixteen. They start winning high school and local newspaper story competitions. We talk about the importance of getting more fiction published in Africa.

Faith: “When it comes to books in Africa, you have a problem. I remember I used to fall on a bookstore called Readwide for my books from Africa and the West. I would go there all the time. But one day I go there and the shop is closed. I assume they didn’t open that day. I go the next day, I go there nearly every day for a week and the shop is always closed. I asked another shop and they said ‘Oh that shop, they folded up. They're not coming back.’

“They had a branch in Accra too, I hear, and it’s folded up. They were devoted to the sale of books, especially novels. There are other booksellers; they are selling more stationery than books. Textbooks, self-help books.

“I remember I was in London last year and earlier this year as well. I sat in a bus. There was this young man reading Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s Half Of a Yellow Sun. I was excited. (Laughs). He was so much into it. Oh, that’s a big step.”

I ask if, when she writes, she has an African in mind.

Faith: “I have Africans in mind as my audience. But of course anyone can read it. Once you have an interest in reading novels with supernatural elements you would enjoy it.

“I think it’s the notion of being accepted internationally. It’s important for especially those contemporary African writers to be accepted internationally. In a way. As they write they have it in the back of their minds that their work should also appeal to an international audience. And by an international audience, the focus is on the West as well. Personally, I don’t have that in the back of my mind. I'm writing for an African audience. If others are interested and want to read, fine. But that is it for me.

“If there are going to be great new opportunities for African writers, it would be as African writers coming together to create these opportunities. First and foremost, understanding that one could sell a million copies all in Africa. It doesn’t have to be a million copies focussed on the West in order to sell.

“Once we understand this we’ll be able to rope in more up-and-coming African writers who will be interested in discussing subject matters and themes from the continent and for the continent—which contemporarily writers these days don’t really find interesting and want to push aside in order to focus a bit more on subject matter and themes that are diasporan or what is called Afropolitan.”

Since this interview

Faith did indeed finish her novel Grey Skies and it’s with her publisher, Flozzie’s Company Limited in Ghana. She also had published another story, ‘Blue Ixora’. She is now working on her first science and supernatural fiction novel. The working title is Gray Dawn.

She has also at the end of 2019 given birth to a little girl, Nana Ekua Nkunim Frimpong.

(Next)

Strung out along the coast: contrasts in Accra town

Accra’s prices can be breathtaking.

I treated Jonathan Dotse to beer and pizza at a downtown venue called the Venus Lounge. It was better than the hotel where we had lunch, and I’d been eating most of the weekend. But beer and pizza cost about sixty quid—say about eighty dollars. Talking to Uber drivers about rents in cosmopolitan Accra, you could be paying $5,000 a month. Honestly, that beats some London prices.

Ghana has a lot going for it. It is definitely West African in feel, but in a much more restrained way than Lagos. People say it’s safer, though Lagos to me seems safe enough. There are a lot of Nigerian expats living there, I am told. I only met one Nigerian while there and he was not exactly a resident.

I did meet a policeman who, with the rest of his time, runs a fashion store. He is one of the butchest fashionistas I ever met. I shared lunch with a gay Ghanaian who showed up with his boyfriend, a handsome young man at least twenty years younger who said about five words all lunchtime. I met a worker for a Chinese company who spends a lot of time and money gambling in Accra’s casinos. I went to a multisensory cinema in an ageing mall in which my seat bumped and sprayed me with scent and water to recreate the thrill of being chased through a 3D gaming world. The more recent shopping mall nearer the airport would not have been out of place on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona.

I frequently say that if you live in the West, you do not have a single accurate image of Africa in your head. In this chapter, you’ll meet one writer whose day job is running a company that makes VR films for a living. Another writer’s day job is working as a marketing intern for an online real estate company modelled on Zillow.

Accra is small enough, laid-back enough to have a beach vibe. The town flattens its face against the sand like a hungry kid at a restaurant window. You can smell the salt spray, and sometimes hear surf. The club life is air conditioned and sharp eyed. I went to a club opening—stylish, icy cool, well behaved and aloof, full of unbelievably beautiful young people, often dancing with oldsters, unembarrassed Ghanaian dads with bellies.

Ghana was the first African country where I ran across that poisonous thing, sex tourism (The Gambia seems more beholden to it and to resent it much more). The beach is full of trim young men in the company of middle-aged wobbly white people.

My landlord (for the second half of the stay) was an ebullient, thuggish Italian-African, born and raised in Ghana. He turned out to run a chain of massage parlours. The women were pleasant as people: honest, funny, and mostly concerned with getting money home to their families.

He was a fascinating character—rooted in his beachfront community, mentoring and adopting a six-year-old boy with whom he had a touching parental relationship. He made damn sure I tipped everyone. He was also buying up villages and converting them to tourism. One of my most interesting days was a long drive and boat trip with him to a palm-frond village on a river island. He was buying it up with the approval of the smart young men of the village and the misgivings of the older gentlemen. "They’ll have even less if they don’t have this," my host warned me.

Unlike Nigeria, Ghana has swathes of empty land. Its population in total is roughly 28 million (Lagos not including Lekki is about 21 million). We drove for most of a day though towns that didn’t seem to have much industry at all.

When I flew to the ancient capital of Kumasi, I was astounded to see forests and lakes, beautiful countryside that I was not used to seeing in Nigeria.

Land: view from an apartment complex in Kumasi

Uganda has no fewer than five continuing sub-national kingdoms, the most notable being that of the Ganda people. Ghana has the Asante Empire with its royal palace in Kumasi. It’s now a museum full of royal tables and sofas, photographs, old radios, mementos, and videos of rituals. My host in Kumasi, Faith Ben-Daniels, whom you will meet later in the series, insisted on taking me on a tour of the palace. Unfortunately, after my Ghana trip, my phone died, taking many of my Ghana photos with it. So no photos of the island, the school visit I made to present to school kids with Jonathan, or of the visit to the royal palace.

The Asante Empire survived ruthless attacks by the British—including the exile of its king Prempeh. The grandmother of his heir took over. The continuity of the Empire and the kingship survived—there is still a king. You will not see the golden stool that is the mark of his office. It descended from heaven and it houses the soul of the Asante people, including those to be born in the future. The king himself is not allowed to sit on it.

The British demanded that their representative sit on it, and that it be sent to Queen Victoria—and when it was refused, hunted it to melt it.

Colonialism old and new haunts Ghana. Faith Ben-Daniels wanted to show me part of a national park that had been strip-mined, she claimed, by illegal Chinese miners. Certainly, there were posters in the airport warning foreign nationals against illegal mining. The gold is taken from the land and sent away illegally with no taxes paid (unless you count bribes as tax).

It was called the Gold Coast, the centre of the slave trade where European ships came to buy people and ship them in foul conditions to countries where everything they were and knew was going to be obliterated. Historical tourism of the slave sites has become an industry. Manu Herbstein has made himself an expert in that history with such worldwide implications.

Ghana does seem to lack the extreme poverty that slaps you across the face when you travel across Nigeria by bus. Accra looks pretty generally more prosperous with less overall wealth ... though the skyscrapers around the airport give Victoria a run for its money.

Accra airport skyscrapers.

The conventional narrative is that the monster Jerry Rawlings shot many of the corrupt class and that gave Ghana some room for growth (the taxi drivers will also tell you the corruption is coming back). I don’t buy it, but I pass it on as an interesting urban legend—and because Ayi Kwei Armah, in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, describes the avenging terror so unforgettably.

Ghana was the first African nation to become independent of Britain in 1959. The University of Ghana was founded in the 1940s at the same time as the University of Ibadan in Nigeria—mainly at the insistence of the Ghanaians. After independence it became a university in its own right with the power to award is own degrees.

The University of Ghana in Accra, where Martin Egblewogbe teaches.

For a country of its size, Ghana seems to have an organized literary life. Great writers who are Ghanaian include Ama Ata Aidoo, Ayi Kwei Armah, and B. Kojo Laing. An Accra journalist and teacher called Geosi organizes regular visits by writers to a local school (he had me and Jonathan Dotse together), in addition to interviewing African writers. In this part, Martin Egblewogbe describes the small but very active activities of the local literati.

Ghanaian aspirations: advertisement in Accra airport.

(Next)

You may not have heard of Eko Atlantic. It’s a huge new development, raising a new landspace from marsh and ocean. It is nicknamed “The Great Wall of Lagos.”

The idea is that it will rival developments like Dubai, and make Lagos an oceanside tourist destination. It will also provide new luxury accommodation for the Lagosian elite. And it may further divide the city-state from itself.

On the border between Lagos Island and Ikoyi

There are, as A Igoni Barrett says, many Nigerias, many Lagoses. A Igoni Barrett had to invent a city that had parts of all Nigerian cities, so that he could write about all Nigerians in all their diversity.

Amatesiro Dore can accept a Nigerian identity even though Nigeria is an outcome of colonialism, created by the West without asking the people there what they wanted. “But my blood is Itsekiri,” he says, referring to his ethnic identity. He has experience of being a privileged Nigerian leaving the islands, then crossing to live in relative poverty in a district called Ago. And he is an out gay man. Even now many believe that homosexuality is either demonic or something imported from the West.

The new suburbs along the Lekki peninsula

Nigeria is a country divided between North and South, Muslim and Christian, queer and straight, male and female, desert and forests and plateaus and coastlines. It speaks three hundred or four hundred languages—or is it 700?—each language embodying a different culture.

These two interviews touch on many of those divisions—between West and Africa, between pan-Africans and localists, among the nation’s many great religions.

There are many great walls of Lagos.

And yet Nigeria is also one of the most optimistic and hopeful countries. Nigerians really do believe that things will get better, that they will come through OK, in a way that maybe westerners don’t.

I remember being stranded in Jalingo, Taraba State, during the fuel subsidy strike in 2012. There was no petrol. There were shortages of food. I had no way of getting home and no way of getting any further cash as all my budget for the trip was being spent. How would I get back to Abuja with no money? Could I get a flight with all the airports closed?

I was in despair. A female student smiled, shrugged, and said. “Oh we’ll get through this, we always do.”

I remember talking to my head of department at Taraba State Uniersity. A Fulani, he was about to do a postdoctorate on the Hausa language at a university in Istanbul. I was amazed to learn from him that Fulani and Hausa are unrelated languages from different language groups. ‘But everyone thinks of the Fulani and the Hausa as almost one people. How do you get along so well?’

“Oh,” he said with a smile. “We have shared the same ground for so long.”

Would that the West had ever learned that lesson. Despite or perhaps because of that diversity, I find Nigeria to be one of the most civil and friendly countries I’ve visited.

These interviews for whatever reason talk about things that divide. And how literature through empathy and truthfulness opens gates.

(Next)

A. Igoni Barrett

Furo Wariboko awoke this morning to find that dreams can lose their way and turn up on the wrong side of sleep. He was lying nude in bed, and when he raised his head a fraction he could see his alabaster belly, and his pale legs beyond, covered with fuzz that glinted bronze in the cold daylight pouring in through the open window. He sat up with a sudden motion that swilled the panic in his stomach and spilled his hands into his lap. He stared at his hands, the pink life lines in his palms, the shellfish-coloured cuticles, the network of blue veins that ran from knuckle to wrist, more veins than he had ever noticed before. His hands were not black but white ... same as his legs, his belly, all of him. He clenched his fists, squeezed his eyes shut, and sank on to the bed. Outside, a bird chirruped short piercing cries, like mocking laughter.

When he opened his eyes again the air was silent, the bird was flown. Turning on his side, his gaze roved the familiar corners of his bedroom and rested on his going-out shoes, their brown leather polished to a dull lustre, placed at attention beside the door. His blue T.M. Lewin shirt and his favourite black cotton trousers (which he had stayed awake till after midnight, when power returned, to iron) were hanging from the chair at the desk.

The opening to Blackass.

Blackass is regarded by some as a mainstream literary novel. At first glance it’s a Kafka-esque romp about a black Lagosian called Furo who wakes up one morning looking white—except for his rump.

The novel soon confounds expectations.

A character called, like the author, Igoni, appears to slip between genders. Like many people, I regard the novel as being speculative—and so did the members of the African Speculative Fiction Society, who shortlisted it for the first Ilube Nommo Award.

It was also nominated for the inaugural FT/Oppenheimer Funds Emerging Voices Awards, the 2016 Kitschies’ Golden Tentacle Award, and the 2017 Pen Open Book Award.

Barrett has had a distinguished career. A story from his first collection won the BBC World Service Short Story Competition. Grants, residencies, and travel followed. He was listed among the Africa 39—the 39 best African writers under forty.

I start out by asking why the novel has a character who has the same first name as the author (almost—the initial A for Adrian is missing). He asks to be called A. Igoni.

A Igoni: “For me it’s about playing with readers’ expectations. Most readers will assume that Igoni is the author, and begin to ask, ‘Is this nonfiction going on here?’

“Every character in that book is me, and every character in the book is not me. They all come out of my head, including a character who is named after me. It’s a manifestation of me. And there’s a point later where that character becomes something else.”

Basically the character Igoni seems to become a woman. Or was she always a woman?

A. Igoni: “It was not meant to be clear. Is anything ever clear these days? I am a man, and when I walk on the street, people see me as a man, but who says I don’t see myself as a woman? And tomorrow if I decide to dress like a woman, to shave my legs and my beard, put on fake hair and go out on the street, people might see me as a woman though I am the same person inside.

“One of the things that inflamed my desire to write this book was the discussion that started in Nigeria where young educated people would say that it’s not part of African culture to be gay. You have to ask, ‘what is this African culture you claim to know?’ For me it was important to challenge people’s beliefs.

“I have conversations, for example, in bars in Nigeria where I sit down and say, ‘I’m a writer and I believe that women are equal. I believe what our President said, that his wife ‘belongs in the other room’ is wrong.’ And I have had people challenge me and had discussions where my voice was drowned out by the majority.

“As a writer your voice cannot be drowned out. That book will go out into the world and those same people you lost arguments with in a bar will maybe read that book. You have to win them over with empathy. You have to make them believe in these characters and see these characters. It’s a slow process. I hope that by the time I am done as a writer I will change their children if not them.

“Books are about play. It’s about fun. I came to books as a child because I wanted to be transported, whether it was to space, whether it was to Boise, Idaho. But then over time I began to have opinions, formed by books and by personal experiences. At a certain age I felt I had so many things that I wanted to say that I became a writer.

“I live in a society where it is possible for me to live in a nice apartment and provide some level of comfort for myself, but I can step out my door and right next to me is a woman living on the street with twins.

“I’m not an American, where at least I know that even if I am poor the government will step in. There is a major disparity in people’s incomes in this country and in people’s beliefs. I live in a country where some people believe it is right to chop off the hand of a man who steals...

“And that informs my writing. As much as I write because I enjoyed William Faulkner or I enjoyed reading Octavia Butler, I also am a writer because I grew up in Nigeria. That was enough to keep me at my desk for two years, writing this book.”

We talk about how Furo as an oyibo does a tour of Lagos. I ask if the club of black women who want white husbands because they think white people are rich is real or a satirical exaggeration.

A Igoni: “That exists. You have to adjust to certain parts of Lagos. This is a novel focused on a character who is perceived as white, so everything is filtered through him. In that book those incidents have more significance than in the average Nigerian’s life. But many Nigerians will recognize those things.

“The book is dedicated to my father. My father’s name is Lindsay Carlton Barrett. He’s a novelist and a journalist. He’s still alive. He’s Jamaican and has lived in Nigeria for fifty years and loves Nigeria, knows Nigeria more that I will ever know.

Novelist, journalist and playwright Lindsay Carlton Barrett

“He’s always been an outsider. He carries a Nigerian passport today. But he just happens to be a light-skinned Jamaican. And I’ve spent my entire life watching people view my father as an outsider on the basis of his skin colour. Even when he opens his mouth and espouses his knowledge about Nigeria. His fifty years in Nigeria involved him in the Biafran War, involved him in the early journalistic institutions in this county. But he’s always first and foremost ‘that oyibo man.’”

GR: “Oyibo?”

A. Igoni: “Well he has light skin, white beard, fluffy hair; he’s a Father Christmas type. So he’s not ‘full oyibo’ as people would say. Oyibo in the formal sense is ‘a Caucasian.’ But the word has been expanded to include Lebanese, Indian, Chinese—anybody who is the Other, including mixed race people, will be called oyibo in the market. So my half-sister, who is American and who is light-skinned, goes to the Nigerian market, and she will be called oyibo.

“Those are deep-seated issues when you cannot imagine that it is possible for a Nigerian to do anything but look one way. There are Lebanese who have been here maybe one hundred years and speak Hausa, speak Yoruba, but whenever they go to renew their passport, they are questioned about their Nigerianess.

“Nigerians will tell you it’s not a bad thing (calling you oyibo); it’s a good thing, we’re acknowledging you.”

GR: “I don’t believe it. People who like you don’t call you oyibo.”

A Igoni: “Exactly. It’s a society that puts you in battle mode, ready to engage. If you are grieving the loss of a loved one and go out into Nigerian society as a white person, you can’t imagine how difficult it can be.

“So Blackass goes back to my childhood experience, watching my father all his life, even at the end—he’s now seventy-five. Sometimes when we’ve had a few drinks together he gets bitter about his life. One of the things he gets bitter about is that he left Jamaica fifty years ago. At that time very few Jamaicans were coming to Africa. Even the Rastafarians would sing, exoticize about Africa, but not actually move here. He came as a writer and settled, had children here, married here, has invested so much hard work in the country. The only passport he has is Nigerian and yet when he steps out into the street he’s still oyibo.”

I say to A. Igoni, that for me, his novel captured a sense that transitioning, in many senses of the word, is the modern experience.

A. Igoni: “Igoni the character had several things to do in that story. Number one was to re-iterate Furo’s experience, to repeat and strengthen Furo’s experience in living through another transition. It wasn’t shown in the book but the assumption was that Igoni also had a change, but I didn’t want to put a stamp on it by saying he woke up one morning as a woman, because today you have so many possibilities of becoming a woman if you want to.

“Some people have asked me at readings, ‘Actually I’m curious about how Furo could become white. I’m interested myself. How do you lighten your skin so quickly?’ (Chuckles) Because people actually try to lighten their skin, people are actually trying to change their sex. These are realities that we didn’t have two hundred years ago. So I didn’t want to focus so much on the how, but on the ‘what if?’ ‘What if this were you?’

“I was at a point in my writing career where I was asking myself, ‘what does it really mean to be a human being?’ I used to think I was special being a writer. I was the voice of the voiceless. But if you are the voice of the voiceless then you are part of the problem, because the voiceless need to go find their own voices.

“I began to ask myself why am I writing in the age of the internet, in the age of Facebook where everybody is a writer. Everybody posts something, everyone can start a blog. Everyone can find entertainment in so many ways. What is the job of a writer?

“So Igoni’s part in that book is a manifestation in future form of the writing process, of the way we sit down on our balconies and bring out our jotting pad when we see a bird doing something and take notes...

“We’re voyeurs and we’re storytellers and we’re liars and in some ways destroyers. I want to destroy society to rebuild it in my own image. (Laughs) The Igoni character for me was outside morality. She was going to do whatever she had to do to get her story. Because that character was also writing a novel and felt, ‘Well, OK, I want to have sex with the main character to see where that goes.’ But nothing comes of that so she thinks, ‘Let me bring some tension into my story by bringing the parents (Furo’s) over.’ Both the Igoni character and the Furo character are for me contemporary, modern, selfish human beings.”

We talk a bit about how the main character Furo is unlikeable, as real people are. That leads to Hilary Clinton’s emails, and how they made him like her more: ‘Is that the worst you’ve got?’ We go on to fake news, social media and on what Trump means for the USA.

A. Igoni: “Many times in Nigeria we say our problems are just about education. ‘We just need to educate more people. People need to get more enlightened and our problems will all be fixed.’ Well from what’s going on in Europe and the States, no. Human beings will find new ways to mess up, despite education.

“The flip side is that Nigerian society is where we have figures of 75 to 80 per cent poverty, yet people are hopeful. ‘I will struggle and send my children to school. I didn’t get an education, but my children will travel.’ They see a path to success through improving their children’s lives.

“I was astounded that Americans didn’t (have this optimism) even though their lives are so much better materially. They live in better houses, they have good roads, and yet you can see how much more fearful they are.

“You are spoiled, and you are fearful, and you are willing to challenge your own long-held values, to throw them over so easily.”

I get back to the book. I say that as a white man, I found some of the reactions to Furo by Nigerians in the street a bit exaggerated.

A. Igoni: “I’ve been accused of that, and even Nigerians have said it. I will contend that it’s not. A point was made in a paragraph explaining the different parts of Lagos. That’s the other thing about Nigeria.

“When I say I know Nigeria, I lie. I can never, not in my lifetime, know Nigeria in the way that an American can know America. Because there is some sort of unified American experience. You go to school, you all read the same type of books. You all read The Catcher In The Rye across the States. You all watch The Brady Bunch or The Wonder Years. There are certain movies you all watch. You stay up at night to watch the Tonight show—unified experiences that Nigeria doesn’t have.

“More than half of Nigeria is in the North. In many of these places a woman is not allowed to wear trousers. On TV they just banned an actress in Northern Nigeria because she hugged a man in a music video. Whereas in Lagos the women are walking about in underpants in music videos. This is the same country. The books I read in school were different from the schools in Ibadan, that’s another part of southern Nigeria. The lingua franca of southern Nigeria is English. The languages of Northern Nigeria are Hausa, followed by Arabic before English. So I will definitely communicate better in Nairobi, Kenya than I will in most parts of Northern Nigeria.

“Now this character (Furo) was walking about in a part of Lagos called Egbeda. I lived in Egbeda for two years. You probably passed near it when you came into Lagos from Abeokuta, the outskirts of Lagos. When I first came to Lagos to get a job, I lived in Surulere. I knew Ikoyi. That’s Lagos for many people.

Mainland Lagos, a prosperous part of Idi Oro district, between Surulere and Mushin districts

“But there are many people who have never crossed the bridge into the islands. (Lagos and Victoria Islands are more likely to have prosperous districts). Millions of Lagosians have never crossed the bridge. (Lagos may have as many as 23 million inhabitants). So their idea of Lagos is Makoko or Ikeja. When they get to Ikoyi it’s like, ‘That’s foreign. Where is this? Is this my country?’

“I moved to Egbeda when I couldn’t afford the house rent in Surulere. Within an hour’s drive (without traffic, four hours with [traffic]) from Sururele was this place I had never been to before and it was totally different. It was urban, undoubtedly so, but in a different way. I lived there two, maybe three, years and in all my time in Egbeda I never saw one white person. Once when I saw an Indian, he attracted so many stares that I felt sorry for him.

“Seeing a white person strolling down the street in Egbeda is like seeing a snake in the city, it’s such a surprise. Imagine you are a sixteen-year-old who has never seen a white person in the flesh. You’ve always seen them on TV, you’ve always seen them in Spider Man suits, so that (a Western) person becomes the personification of every fantasy of America. I would say if you are a white person and you want to test the truth of the reactions to Furo, just go into Egbeda.

“Even me. If I am dressed in my nice jeans, I stand out, people can tell. In many ways we are a stratified society. It’s just not by skin colour, but by economic status. If I walk into a buka in Ikeja, the saleswoman assesses me and I will get special treatment; I will draw looks as being odd.

“I’ve never learned how to drive, I don’t own a car. I don’t believe in God. When I open my mouth in Nigeria and say these things, I am constantly defending, explaining myself. ‘How can you not like cars?’ Because everyone wants three cars. Therefore I must be lying about not liking cars. I must be telling lies when I say I believe cars are destroying the world.”

He tells a story about picking up plastic trash outside his flat and a neighbour’s driver asking why, as an Oga, a big man, he just didn't have someone pick it up for him.

A. Igoni: “Doing even simple things has to be defended for a black Nigerian who is seen to be of means. Much less of a Nigerian who happens to be white. He or she has to deal with my baggage and the extra.

“Some of the most passionate defences of my book have been from white Nigerians.

“For example, I’m married to a white woman. For many years I didn’t feel passionate about people calling others oyibo, until it began to affect me. I had a sense of it growing up with a father who was always made to feel an outsider.

“I thought I was just marrying a woman, and then how to deal with people looking at me and calling me a Foreigner Boy or a 419 guy? When you see a young black man with a white wife, the idea is that you must be a scammer. They think of these Nigerian lads that do dating scams, get a white wife, deceive her, get her money. They say, ‘Oh he’s a leech. He’s married to that white woman, he’s a user.’

“At the time I was writing Blackass I hadn’t even met my wife. (Laughs) Basically, I walked into my own novel. I was doomed to experience what my characters were experiencing. I am even surer now than when I wrote that book, that I had gotten it right.”

A. Igoni talks about how both Furo and he have to fight not to become arrogant, become the Oga. ‘Oga, you are too big to walk.’ He goes on to describe a white American lady who married a Nigerian and wants to stay in Nigeria, because having a white mother gives her son advantages.

A. Igoni: “That’s a clear indictment of our society. If you treat someone special because they are white, what does that say about you? If a majority-black country says ‘He’s rich, treat him different because he’s white. I’ll be friendly towards him because he’s white.’ What does that say about the ninety-nine per cent who are black people? It says that you see yourselves as less than special.

“I was taught by my parents not to be rude. I have walked past parents whose children call my wife oyibo and the parents don’t correct them. There’s a character in Blackass whose child bursts into tears when she sees Furo and the mother says ‘No fear, no cry ... No be Ojuju, nah oyibo man.’ Ojuju is a local word for masquerade; basically he’s the bogeyman in a sense, something a child is scared of. So the mother tells her child he’s not a bogeyman, he’s a white man. He’s not a bogeyman but he’s something equal to one. These are deep-seated issues in Nigerian society.”

We talk about A Igoni’s career as a writer. His early stories were published internationally on the internet (for example ‘Dream Chaser’ in Eclectica, 2008). He founded an online literary magazine called Black Biro, worked for years as an editor at Farafina magazine in Lagos, and spent two years in the Niger Delta trying to set up a farm.

A. Igoni: “I grew up in the extreme south, the South-South as we call it, the Niger Delta. I grew up thinking I was city boy but I knew I didn’t understand my country. There were parts of Nigeria I’d never seen. When I went to Lagos, it was so different from Port Harcourt. Yoruba was spoken. When I went for the first time as a child to the North, it was like a different country.”

“When I was fourteen I tried to write poetry, when I was sixteen I tried to write plays. They came out sounding very Shakespearian. Then in 2001, I stumbled on a book—I was walking past a second-hand bookshop at university. I saw this cover that was really lovely, green with a naked woman on it, with ‘Nobel Prize Winner’ scrawled across it. I’d never read a Nobel Prize winner except for Soyinka, who was a dramatist. It turned to be Marquez’s Love In the Time of Cholera. And it blew me away. It felt African in a way I hadn’t recognized before. I could see Nigeria in there, my experiences in there, I could see the world in there. It had a worldview. Another writer who excites that kind of passion in me is Thomas Mann.

“When I finished that book I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing to others what this book had done to me. It made me see myself in the world and that I had a stake in the world. It made me feel connected to Colombia. A fictional Colombian woman was the love of my life. You can preach to the end of time, ‘Love thy Neighbour.’ But just show me my neighbour and you don’t need to tell me to love.

“At that time I was a science student. I was studying agriculture, learning to become a farmer. I thought, ‘well then, I need to learn how to write, and to write I need to feel many things.’ I knew I would learn from life if I was determined and lucky, and had some talent.

“In university, I had no friends who read books. I even used to hide the fact I read books. It was considered a bit effeminate. I wanted to be a tough guy so I read in secret. And I wrote in secret too.

“I needed to see if I was deceiving myself. I needed someone else to read my work. So I went to look for my father.

“My father and my mother separated when I was ten. I hadn’t seen him for all these years. He’s a bit of a traveller. He’d been in Liberia, The Gambia, and other places. I hadn’t seen him from when I was ten till twenty one, which is when I started writing.

“So I went to look for him, found him. He was the first person to read my work and he told me, ‘You have something. Keep at it.’ It was a good way to reconnect with one’s father.”

A. Igoni read British novels, which seemed to show the UK as a unified culture. Nigeria by contrast, “didn’t feel like a nation to me.” He chose short stories as being a way to show the diversity of Nigeria.

A. Igoni: “I could focus in one story today on a bread seller from the North. And next I could focus on a catfish cook from the East, trying to capture the diversity of Nigeria, and look to the book itself for that unifying thing that holds all the short stories together.“

One of A. Igoni’s first stories was published by Farafina when it was founded in 2004. Back then it was an online magazine, but it soon moved into print with its first book, the landmark novel Purple Hibiscus by Chimimanda Ngozie Adichie.

“Farafina was a Nigerian magazine based in Nigeria, so I didn’t have to explain the language to them. How can you defend your language once you are edited by someone who has no access to your experience? When a British editor copyedits, they skip the pidgin because they can’t get it.”

In 2005 his first short story collection, From Caves of Rotten Teeth, was published with financial help from his father.

“That collection was my juvenilia basically. I was still learning how to write, learning technique.” However a story in the collection, “The Phoenix” won the 2005 BBC World Service Short Story Competition. A. Igoni used the prize money, along with more funding from his father, to co-found Black Biro magazine with a friend in 2006.

“I was in this hiatus, a period where I’d published my first book, my first set of stories. I wasn’t writing that much. So it felt good to be useful. I was able to channel my energies into this magazine.

“I was so broke I couldn’t even afford cybercafé time any more. I didn’t have a computer. So I actually had an online magazine without having a computer. I didn’t know how to use a computer except for typing.

“It was a bi-monthly magazine. After the second issue I got an offer from Farafina to buy out me and my friend. They had read the magazine and wrote to me saying they really admired the work I was doing and would I like a job?

“I had wanted to be a farmer, so I thought I would farm during the day and get to write at night. I spent two years in the Niger Delta, living in a village and trying to get a loan to start a farm. At that time there was a school-to-land project trying to attract Niger-Delta youths away from crude oil militancy. I applied to them for a loan, but never heard back.

“So I took the job at Farafina and moved to Lagos in 2007. I began editing a print magazine with like thirty contributors per issue. I began to realize that the job was affecting my writing, in good ways as well as bad, so I left in 2009.

“I became a full-time writer. I’d saved some money. I started a book-reading series, which brought in some money at a bookstore in Lagos. I did that for a few months, and then I got really broke, but by then I was already writing my second book. I was so broke I moved back in with my ex-girlfriend who was kind enough to give me a room in her apartment. It was getting so hard to survive as a writer in Nigeria. I might have given in.”

One of the participants in A. Igoni’s book-reading series was Binyavanga Wainaina. In 2010, Binyavanga was a director of the Chinua Achebe Fellowship, and he encouraged A. Igoni to apply for it. A. Igoni got the fellowship, and so travelled out of Nigeria for the first time to another African country, Kenya, for the duration of the fellowship, living in Nairobi and Mombasa.

 A. Igoni: “I came back to Nigeria with a finished book, my second story collection. I had started talking with other writers to form a collective, because I didn’t think anyone would want to publish me in Nigeria. Farafina felt like the only game in town. And I felt it (being published by them) was nepotism in a way.

“We were going to call it the Jalaa Collective. Jalaa is a language that is dying out in Nigeria, around the Taraba area. In 2011 it had only a handful of speakers left. We thought we’d pool our money and resources together, and we’d edit each other’s work.

“Then Binyavanga sent me an email. One of the conditions of the Fellowship was that I would send my work to them to show how I’d spent my time in Kenya. I had emailed my manuscript to Binyavanga, but I didn’t expect to hear from him. He’s a busy guy and even I don’t read every MS that comes into my inbox.

“But about five days after, I get a phone call from a British number. I picked the call and it turns out to be Sarah Chalfant, head of the London office of the Wylie Agency.

“Apparently Binyavanga had read my short story collection and liked it so much that he then emailed it to her and she’d read it and liked it so much that she offered to represent me. So I’ve never had to send my work to an agent, never sent my work to a publisher.”

That second collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That was first published in 2013 in the USA by Graywolf Press, and then in the UK by Chatto and Windus.

“I realized that I was getting some money. But to sustain my lifestyle I had to produce a book every other year. In 2012 I began writing Blackass. I did some travelling. I went to Jamaica for the first time in my life in 2011. Got invited to a literary festival there and spent three months. Spent time with my uncle and met my Jamaican family.

“Then I got a fellowship at the Norman Mailer Centre in Provincetown in the United States and a residency in Italy at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center.

“With that second collection I finally began to see the modern roots of Nigerian nationhood, the thing that is Nigerian. I was happy with that book.

“My short stories are set in a fictional place called Poteko. It’s a little bit like Port Harcourt, and it’s a little bit like Eko, which is a local name for Lagos. It’s in the vein of Macondo in Marquez or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. I wanted to create a fictional city that had bits of Lagos, had bits of Kano, had bits of Port Harcourt, had bits of Warri—the quintessential Nigerian city. That would be a microcosm of the Nigerian state, so I could truly write about all Nigerians in all their diversity. (I began) writing all the stories in that fictional place, except for the last one in the book, which was set in Nairobi, a real place but outside Nigeria.

“Then I thought, much as I love Alice Munro, I wouldn’t want to be the Alice Munro of Nigeria and never write a novel, so maybe I should take a crack a novel now ... the idea that I got for the novel was so different, so (I could) go at it in a different way, a more modern way. Focus on a city and try to capture it.

“With the novel, I wanted to write a different story, allow myself to go into fantasy. People have always called me a social-realistic writer. But fiction is fiction. You create things and capture the reader’s attention and you tell a story. For me it was important to show that I could follow the story wherever it would take me, starting from this Kafka-esque incident where a guy wakes up white.

“So in 2012, I didn’t do much travelling. I sat down and basically set myself to the goal of writing Blackass. I wanted to see if it was possible to write a novel in a year ... I spent nine months writing the first draft and in those nine months I left the house maybe five times. I sat at home, got up every morning, and wrote.”

We talk a bit about writing workshops. From 2001 to 2003 A. Igoni had been sending his fiction to a writing forum based in Australia, writers.net. “That’s how I developed technique. It took me ten years, ten years really. To become confident enough to focus on the story.

“But James Joyce didn’t go to school to learn how to become a writer. If I feel strongly about what I want to say, I will find a means to say it, even if that includes inventing a language.

“Language is a minefield that every writer has to walk across, especially if you are a Nigerian writing in a language that is considered colonial. I don’t consider English a colonial language today, because the language I use is Nigerian English.

“Language is changed by the people who speak it. The diction. All you have to do is read a Nigerian writer who writes in Nigeria and you will see. The English is different. It’s a grammatically correct sentence, but the order of words will be different from an English writer. When the Queen of England speaks I understand her perfectly. But sometimes when Beckham the football player speaks I can hardly hear what he’s saying. Cockney for many Nigerians is incomprehensible.”

In common with writers like Wole Talabi, A. Igoni speaks no other Nigerian language.

A. Igoni: “I was born in this country. I grew up in this country. I speak only English. That’s all I speak, apart from pidgin. For many years I was ashamed. I was wary of saying I don’t speak any native Nigerian languages. But then I realized, look, I can’t go around carrying this feeling. Look, a child learns a language without knowing what the point of language is. If you learn a language because of politics you learn a language for the wrong reason. We learn language to communicate, to connect.

“In my case I grew up in a house where my mother speaks three Nigerian languages and English. And my father speaks English because he’s Jamaican and my parents communicated in English, so I grew up learning English. But I visited my grandmother, I visited my aunties, I lived with them for extended periods, but I never picked up any other language.

“Many urban Nigerians grew up in a Yoruba family but don’t speak Yoruba. There’s a class of Nigerian, citified urban, who don’t speak any other language. It’s about power. It’s about influence. It’s about jobs ... the official language of Nigeria is English ... I went to Nigerian primary and secondary school, a Nigerian university. I didn’t go to expensive private schools. And yet in the schools I attended you were punished for speaking local languages. ‘Don’t speak in the vernacular. Speak Queen’s English.’

“I had an educational advantage over many of my peers going into primary school because I already spoke English from home. Then you get to the civil service, the Constitution, it’s in English. This is a country that has three hundred languages. The Constitution is translated into four languages, if that. The Bible is in two or three languages only ... Yoruba, Igbo, just two I can think of.”

The new ground of Eko Atlantic rises in the distance.

I ask him if there is anything he’d like to say to sum up. He turns the conversation around.

A. Igoni: “I want to talk about the term ‘Africa.’ Lots of young Africans have begun to react negatively to being lumped into one large group. So, ‘Africa is not a country’ is a popular catchphrase. There’s this resistance by intelligent young people to being stereotyped, to being taken as a whole, instead of being seen for their individual qualities.

“Apart from that, traditionally, when people use continental terms they usually have negative connotations. For the first time I’m beginning to hear white supremacists in America refer to themselves as European. They are saying ‘Oh, we are European.’ Now Trump wins and has an event in Washington DC and the guy on stage says ‘Oh, we Europeans are in the ascendency again.’

“There was a time when that would not be acceptable. Americans would say, ‘Hell no, I’m not even British, I am American.’

“The truth is that there is no Africa. I am worried to even say ‘Nigeria’ because there is so much complexity within one individual country. Using Africa as a catch-all term, no. It does a grave injustice to the complexity.

“Having said all of that, I am an African writer. I am an African writer because I live on the African continent and carry a Nigerian passport. But if you think all I am is an African writer, then you are wrong. I’m a writer very focused on Nigeria, but Nigeria is of the world. In the end I just want to tell stories that interest me and engage the reader.

“I want to be read after I’m dead. I want to have a voice in this world. I have a stake in this world. I want to believe that I have something important to say, that two hundred years from now, a nine-year-old boy in Iceland could read it and see something about himself, and so could a ten-year-old in Lagos. It’s not about Nigeria, it’s about being human. About compassion.”

(Next)

Amatesiro Dore

Eyimofe Emiko looked forward to being a mother-in-law to the bride of her only son but expectations were terminated when Femi asked a boy to his senior prom.

Before their first child went to pick up his prom king, she overheard her husband giving him the talk.

“Delay having sex for now,” Mr Jaiyeoba said. “Find your passion and fall in love with it. You will only find the right man after finding yourself. But have fun tonight and ask yourself during temptations: what would Jesus do?” and Femi laughed out of the house.

Eyimofe couldn’t believe her ears. She believed her grandfather’s company had been unfairly bullied out of the Enugu aero-car industry after the 2066 Biafra Independence Referendum and she thought she had convinced her husband to discourage Femi from dating the Biafran boy, but clearly Mr Jaiyeoba thought otherwise.

However, she felt vindicated when Femi broke up with the boy for insisting on pre-marital sex.

“Don’t mind him,” Eyimofe consoled her son. “I’ll find you a proper Yoruba boy with good home training in this Abeokuta.”

Along came Dapo of royal repute. His mum was president of the Abeokuta Stock Exchange and his dad chaired the largest Nigerian Space Estate Agency in Southeast Kepler. After the traditional betrothal was announced, space tabloids began publishing stories about her future son-in-law: only his back remained a virgin, his front has visited every willing crevice in the Goldilocks Zone; during the last winter holidays, he punched his ex-boyfriend at a resort in Kepler 438b. She became uneasy when his family insisted on having a Blood Oath Service at Sango’s Shrine as part of the wedding ceremony. The engagement broke down irretrievably when Femi tongue-kissed his Scottish-Nigerian mechanic during a live broadcast of the Warri Inter-Galaxy Grand Prix.

Yet Eyimofe forbade Femi from marrying Jeremy. She preferred “the Biafran bastard to this bloody British immigrant without naira in his veins.”

“Love and Prejudice,” first published in Omenana

I was staying in the Dolphin estate, a slightly run-down but very pleasant, gated part of Lagos Island. Amatesiro came to be interviewed in my flat there. He came across as a calm, rather jolly person, laughing a lot even though some of his memories evidently gave him pain. We started by talking about his story “Love and Prejudice.”

Amatesiro: “I was talking to a friend of late, that all I had to do the last eight years after graduation was to become Amatesiro Dore. I had to be that person. I believe as writers that we are first human beings. Every other thing is just secondary.

“I studied law in school. So am I the guy who studied law? Or the editor? Or the writer? I had to become Amatesiro, I had to know him. I didn’t know myself for a very long time. (Chuckles)

“I was in the closet for all my life. Fanatical Christianity. The nature of the Christian faith makes you deny your identity. You are all meant to be Christ-like. That’s what it means to be Christian. So you’re no longer Amatesiro Dore. You can’t then discover him. You have to be who God says you are. So I famously used to say, ‘I’m not gay, but I’m the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus.’ (Chuckles)

“‘Love and Prejudice’ was one of the first stories I wrote as Amatesiro Dore. The writer who had found himself, who had become. I like where the story took me. It helped me recreate my world. I spoke about homosexuality and homophobia as though it doesn’t exist. It was just this bubble.

(The story is set in a future in which Nigeria has split after a referendum on Biafran Independence.) “It’s almost a prophecy of a good ending. Everything will turn out right. I might be in a minority but in the long run we are going to win.”

GR: “Billy Kahora talks about how utopias seem to be automatically pan-African. Your story is quite the reverse. Your utopia is about Nigeria falling apart into smaller pieces.”

Amatesiro: “Africa as a continent does not exist. It’s like Europe and Asia, but the Europeans decided they were different though the continents meld together. But for Africa I’m first and foremost an Itsekiri. The old concept of being African is foreign to who I am.

“It’s the arrogance of the majority. To be Itsekiri means you are from Warri. I am one of the few people who can actually say I am Itsekiri because I am from Warri. That’s my consciousness. I reason in Pidgin English. That’s the formative language of my thoughts.”

GR: ”Write a novel in Pidgin, please. My favourite African novel is Sozaboy by Ken Saro-Wiwa.”

Amatesiro: “He’s a minority voice. So he’s one of my biggest influences. What Ken did was not write for the Western world but particularly for indigenes of the Niger Delta. He told our stories. He put us on the map. We are not Igbo, we are not Hausas, we are not Yoruba. We are Itsekiri.

“But, having said that, I met a situation where these groups of people have come together to form a country without a referendum. We’re here now. It’s sixty years of independence. I am the grandchild of independence. And the dreams of the grandchildren of independence are different from the colonialists, or those students from the '70s or '80s.

“I have come to recognize Nigeria. Yes, it is not original; it is not true per se; but it works. I am no more just an Itsekiri. I have siblings from other tribes. Now we have to make those partnerships work based on mutual consensus. How are we going to share our wealth? Do we have a true federalism and monetary system? We need to fight for that space. The minority voices need to be heard and registered and given room to express themselves within that Nigerian identity.

“I’m Nigerian, I’m African, based on colonialisation. But my blood is Itsekiri.”

GR: “It’s interesting that your language is Pidgin. What happened to Itsekiri?”

Amatesiro: “I spent the first four years of my life in Warri. Itsekiri was always a language of secrets. That’s what my parents spoke when they didn’t want us to hear what they were talking about. (Chuckles) So I learnt it from the gossip table. It wasn’t a social currency then. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (a champion of literary use of minority languages) wasn’t dominant in my parents’ bedroom then.

“If I knew what I know now, I would write in Itsekiri. Some of my best pieces are Itsekiri-based. ‘Love and Prejudice’ is a very Itsekiri story. The characters are, the social consciousness is. So is ‘Sweet Play,’ one of the winners for re-imagined folk tale.

Amatesiro. “I had this privileged upbringing. My parents are not married to each other. They were from different spectrums of life. My mother I would say was quite unlucky in marriage. Great guy, wonderful, one of the founding fathers of Nollywood, the movie industry in Nigeria. But he didn’t come with cash. There was no money. There was hardly money to survive. There was no mad money like my biological father.

Looking back across from Victoria Island to Ikoyi.

“I live on both sides of Lagos: on the island and on the mainland. Whenever I was on the mainland, I couldn’t communicate. I spoke English. (Laughs) I spoke literary English. It existed on this plane. It wasn’t the language of the streets.

“Then I went to a suburb in Ago, where Mother still lives, and I befriended the street. I assimilated. That’s the gift my mother gave to me. Poverty made me ... you know?

“My step-siblings were not aware that we were steps until way into high school. (Laughs). When they went to one of my former high schools and claimed to be my brothers, but we bore different surnames. (Laughs).

“Like I said, I grew up in this family of secrets. The language was really powerful; things were shaded. If we were talking about my biological father we called him by his first name, Roland, and we spoke about him in Itsekiri.

“Coming down to Ago, the English we use there is very different. I tried to adapt that in a story of mine, ‘Love by the Talking Drum.’ It affects everything. It’s not Pidgin. It’s a kind of Lagos English, a lot of street slang, and the syntax—it’s beautiful! It gets lost in translation. So I could adapt it in a way. But it exists in its own world.

“Our language is just as powerful as American English, but we haven’t invested in our structures. What we speak in Nigeria is very like ... (long pause) over the years I’ve sent my stories to African editors for one reason only.

“For example: my story ‘Bad Bel-Le’ published in the Ake Review (the official publication of the Ake Festival for 2016). The editor was Molara Wood, one of the best African editors in Africa. It was a piece about jealousy.

“But the language and the spelling of the title. It’s not a bad belly though it means the same thing. To describe a good heart, a good man, in Igbo they will say ‘he has a clean heart. Obiocha.’

“In the Niger Delta where we are more food-inclined, a good man has ‘a clean stomach.’ (Chuckles) So if you have a bad stomach, you are a bad person and so we say ‘bad be-le.’

“The direct English translation for ‘bad be-le’ is ‘green-eyed monster’, jealousy. But for the English it’s more of an external thing but for us jealousy is innate. It’s not how you manage it. It comes from within. The piece is in Nigerian English, Nigerian syntax, and our way of life.

“But for me the power of stories is dependent on the editor. So you can’t have original voices if you don’t have African editors. You’re going to get into the slush pile of The New Yorker trying to get published by somebody else who doesn’t get it. To edit a story is to make it better. And how can you make it better when you don’t know the story?”

Amatesiro’s fabulous shoes

Like many African authors—A. Igoni Barrett, Akwaeke Emezi, Ben Okri, or Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o—Amatesiro writes many different kinds of fiction and nonfiction. He is not a genre loyalist.

“I do speculative fiction because I read everything as a child. I read everything. Every book, and I read what I was meant to read at that stage of my life.

“I did not jump from Enid Blyton. I graduated over the years. I had my romance period where I read everything romance. I had my John Grisham period, then Stephen King. It was during my university days that I started reading literary fiction.

“The beautiful thing about genre fiction is that it’s like a gateway drug. That’s what sucks in readers. It invites them into the world. Weirdly enough the people on the street prefer speculative fiction. That’s what I discovered. They do not want to read about their own realities. It’s too real. Nigeria is hard enough.

“Growing up I never dreamt of being a writer. I did not write any piece until 2009. The first piece I wrote for eyes other than mine got me into the Farafina Writing Workshop hosted by Chimimanda (Ngozie Adichie). It was called ‘Bad,’ and it’s very very bad. (Chuckles.) It was terrible. I don’t know what she saw. Maybe she was intoxicated. But she saw something.

“I was the one of the best twenty writers who applied. So if someone else thinks you are good at something, why not explore how good it is? I was never going to be one of the best twenty lawyers in the world. But writing seemed to open up a door. You could be the best if you put in the work.

“My first published piece after the Farafina workshop was in Kwani for a competition that was won by Mehul Gohil. That was my generation. There were many of us at the time. What’s the name of the Somali writer? Diriye Osman (author of Fairytales for Lost Children 2014). That was in Kwani 06. My story was called ‘Seven Yellow Brassieres for Fried Eggs.’ (Chuckles)

After the workshop, Amatesiro wrote blog posts for the publisher Kachifo/Farafina.

“I was working at Kachifo, blogging for them and editing. It was a job that was organized by Chimananda. It was to subsidize my writing so I could write and earn at the same time. I wrote a post called ‘Life on the Mainland.’ This was my passport, the first original validation, ‘Oh, this guy has something.’ It appeared on the Farafina blog called FlashFriday, in 2013.

“I had moved to my mom’s place in Ago in 2012. But I still used to hang out with friends on the island, and my beer fund for the night could fuel my car for two weeks. But when I went to live on the mainland I hung out with those same set of friends and the bill would came back ₦3900—and we’d spent six hours drinking and had finished almost a crate. So things were so much cheaper on the mainland. I wrote this piece for those friends.”

He then recites the opening from memory.

This is how I know I’m on the mainland: the sound of the muezzin at five a.m. from a nearby mosque, the noise from the flight route above the roof, the price of Star (about a hundred naira above pump price).

On the Island of the affluent in Lagos, I rarely hear aircraft's buzzing in the sky, except the posh helicopters of the busy rich. The airport and flight noise doesn't affect the airspace, it devalues the land.

(Star beer is a popular brand, but it’s more expensive than the fuel at lsland prices.)

He also worked as an editor for the company.

Amatesiro: “It made me a better writer. To edit is to be a slow reader. You have to see things with the person’s eyes. It helped me to see stories, structure, pacing.

“There was this piece ‘The Death of the Last Publishing House in Nigeria.’ It was about piracy and problems affecting publishing in Nigeria at that time, which are still relevant now, painfully enough.”

Amatesiro has a unique writing process.

Amatesiro: “About 2011, I had these five ideas. I wrote them out and they were not very good. The ideas were good, but I didn’t have the craft to pull them off. So every year I rewrote them. Every year. (Laughs.) Until the tail end of last year.

“Over the years what I have developed is a process. I have a very rigid process. It’s a personal process because life has taught it to me. I acquired patience. I had a career switch from law into literature. I was starting from scratch. You can’t jump the gun. It was like beginning all over again—syntax, punctuation, and stuff like that. I found out the way my body works personally.

“A title might come and I jot it down. And maybe three weeks down the line there’s a theme that suits the title. It’s there. It takes me a while to connect the dots. So I work on twenty-five stories at the same time. Whatever dot is connected I sit down and I work on it.

“So I’m always writing. I’m walking down the road, I’m borrowing materials from everywhere. Does this fit into that piece? How can I use this? How can I turn it into fiction?

“My writing is very architectural. If I do not have a plan when I sit down in front of the laptop, it will be a disaster; it will just be piling up beautiful paragraphs. There has to be a structure that is pre-established ...

“I still give myself freedom. I go with the flow. There’s order in the chaos. And there are times when I don’t write. I could do two paragraphs or do three hundred words. Even if it’s still coming, I let it take a rest. Take a nap. Sleep. That’s my process.

“Last year (2015) was a very bad year. I was homeless for six months because my Mom was like, ‘Oh, you’re getting older, and you have a degree, go support yourself.’ So I stayed with friends. I applied for a lot of residencies. I applied for a lot of things that did not click.

“So at the end of last year I had officially failed. By December last year (2015) I stopped trying to impress anybody. I stopped writing for prizes. I just gave no consideration to them anymore because it was official: I was no good.

“From January this year I began to write for myself. When I rewrote the stories there was no pressure. Binyavanga (Wainaina) or Chimimanda (Ngozie Adichie) were not hanging over my shoulders. (Laughs.) I just tried to write for Amatesiro.

“I came out in August. I did the ‘queer poetry’ called ‘Joy’ 2015 which was published in Brittle Paper, and that was my outlet. I’d become Amatesiro Dore. The writing just worked better.

“The first acceptance letter this year was from Munyori Literary Journal for ‘Love by the Talking Drum.’ It was a validation. Half of the story was written in Pidgin English. And he (Emmanuel Sigauke, the editor) got it! He got what I was trying to do. And his edits were beautiful. The story was way longer than what was published so he was like, ‘Oh, ‘Tesiro, this story ends here.’ And I totally agreed with him.

“I got the acceptance letter. That was like ‘Yes!’ That formula I’d been working on for years, a story that appeals to a literary professor and that would appeal to my mother. I’d finally written it. In that same spirit I did the rest of a short story collection both for my mother and the nonexistent professor.

“The story was written in local English. After decades of marital celebrations, Femi the character decides to marry another wife. He wants to marry someone else. He does not want a second wife because he does not believe in polygamy. But the wife refuses to let go, so she consults African juju how to get him back. And she gets him back. (Laughs).

“‘Talking Drum’ was an answer to ‘Who Will Greet You at Home?’ by Lesley Nneka Arimah. (Joint winner of the first Nommo Award for Speculative Short Story.) It was this amazing story. Feminist. There was no male character and it was politically correct.

“But if I was going to talk about feminism, it would be from a chauvinistic point of view. I intended to sell feminism to chauvinists and misogynists, so I wrote it in their language, from their own point of view, whilst pushing my feminist agenda. There are a lot of guys who were turned off by ‘Who Will Greet You at Home?’, which is a brilliant story but they wouldn’t go beyond the third paragraph. ‘Love by the Talking Drum’ said the same thing, but gave them what they want.” (Chuckles).

I say it seems to me that life for LGBTI people in Nigeria is getting easier.

Amatesiro: “This is my theory of what happened. It was an American change. You suddenly had shows like Empire. There was a lot of positive representation of gay people on television though we didn’t have a lot of local content. But we are all hooked on foreign shows. So they show the humanity. ‘Oh, they’re just another set of human beings with human problems. And if you want to get married, welcome to marital problems also.’ (Laughs)

“What our culture had done is to say, ‘We do not have twins in Calabar because we kill our twins. Twins are not natural.’ So we camouflage our gay society, assimilate our homosexuals into sterile sexual lives. They are rendered ineffectual. There are no gay people in Nigeria because we have made it appear so.

“But now there is a consciousness. Oh, you have a gay cousin, a gay father, a gay aunt. A gay friend. It has been humanized. You have people who have never left the country who are gay, people in small communities. A lot of things have changed.

“I have a piece coming out soon called ‘Friends in a Ship’ (in the online journal Africa Is a Country), about how I met this young man in my mom’s neighbourhood who was non-conformist, not atheist but post-god. He understands religion and how it works.

“We became friends about a week before I completed my memoir, so it was the first person around me after the memoir was done and I had this craving to share, so I read pieces to him and he was like, ‘Oh my god.’ That was how he found out I was gay. He never knew.

“The friendship continued. And we’re very close now as in mutual respect. It changed a lot for me. I found out that the kind of battles I want to fight are not the Western type. We’re not a country of protest. We don’t carry placards. There is a Nigerian way to protest. Which is just lead the life. They need to see gay people. You need to come out of the closet. That’s the only way to win. Not really putting up a Facebook post, or like fighting the government. Those are the Western concepts of protest.”

He says that frankly, at times being a writer in Nigeria has been enough of a struggle.

Amatesiro: “There are rules of engagement, things you have to do—get a job, shelter, feeding, and all those basics of a human being. I got carried away with the dream. It was a good thing with a lot of bad side effects. (Chuckles). Because it helped me concentrate on the work. All I cared about was the next piece. Like ‘How do I finish this piece?’

“Then years had gone by and I had no income structure, which began to affect the writing. So everything I’m saying is now in retrospect. If I’d known better, I would have kept on with my legal practice and then written on the side.

“But this art doesn’t share. That’s the truth about it. ‘Be a doctor by day, writer by night.’ Who are you kidding? You are one thing in the true sense of it. To get to a very good level, you need to be consistent. It’s the practice, it’s the doing that makes you the writer, not the dreams. I needed to put in the time.

“But what happened was I learned to live within my writing dreams. First step I did, I left the island. My dad is rich and influential. But his wealth suffocated my art. I was still lazy. I wasn’t hungry enough. There is a hunger required for this. There was not enough stick for me. I had to consciously live off writing. That means I am applying for grants, looking out for residencies; you are taking the craft more seriously. There’s more at stake. It helps you get better. Because it’s life and death for you.

“It’s cost me a lot financially. I’ve been broke for most of my life, but I feel if I’m a carpenter doing my apprenticeship, I’m going to be suffering some inadequacies at whatever level. Whatever I have to undergo to pass a level, I should. I see it as paying my dues.”

GR: “How do you eat?”

Amatesiro: “Modestly? It provides once-a-day meals, which I’m very grateful for. I’ve learnt to live with less. At my own pace.

“I used to bed-wet up until I was thirteen, I was already in SSI, that’s senior high school, and it made my boarding experience in school terrible. That’s what made me born again. I found God very early in life because I needed a miracle. That’s what got me into church. I had a reason to pray.”

GR: “But it worked?”

Amatesiro: “Um. I actually thought I was miraculously healed. I’d taken my faith very seriously. After a month, I noticed that I had not bed-wet.

 “I could do it three times in a single night. You just finish cleaning up. And in rainy season the floor never dries. I was suicidal. I was suicidal. It gave me hope because I said to myself, ‘One day I’m going to laugh about this.’ So to actually laugh about it was, wow, very therapeutic.”

GR: “When did you laugh about it?”

Amatesiro: “Uh. Post graduation. When I began to take stock of my life. When I stopped bedwetting the pain was with me for years, a very long time. It was after graduation when the writing life was difficult, so I was like ‘Don’t worry. You used to bed-wet. One day you will laugh about this phase.’ (Laughs).

“I’ve just found out I’m shortlisted for an award. The story is ‘For Men Who Care.’ It’s been shortlisted for the Gerald Kraak Award. Just found out two days ago, but hold on until it’s publicised.

“The story will appear in their gender-and-human-rights anthology. (Pride and Prejudice: The Gerald Kraak Anthology of African Perspectives on Gender, Social Justice and Sexuality ) It’s for my audience. I’m very happy they liked it. It’s an award for writers, filmmakers, graphic designers—anyone producing a work that advances theories of gender, sexuality, or human rights in Africa. Gerald Kraak was a white journalist in South Africa.”

Since then, he has won the Reimagined Africa award for his modern folktale ‘Sweet Play.’ In January 2016, he found out that his manuscript ‘Life on a Blackboard; Vignettes of a Queer Nigerian’ was one of five winning proposals for the Saraba Manuscript Projects awards.

Amatesiro: “Something interesting with the Saraba Prize happened. I was having problems at home. The Prize saved my life. I had six months to get my life together. They were going to announce the shortlist on May 31. So on the Friday, the last Friday in May. I was with my friends, and I was like, ‘Man, it didn’t work out. I should have got an email today. But they didn’t send me an email. I think the story’s really good ...’

“So I was really on my own. On Tuesday, June 6, I got a call from a friend. ‘Hey, congratulations, you’re on the list.’ And I’m like, ‘Are you serious? They didn’t even send me an email.’

“It occurred to me that he was one of the three people I would have called to say I was on the shortlist. What my years in literature did was, I lost my friends. I was meant to be a lawyer. Now I went into literature. I’m no more on the island. I’m on the mainland. My mates are all married. People have moved on in life. I’m still trying to figure out the next sentence. So I didn’t have people to share that success with, and it was very painful. The people I called, all three I had known less than a year. It was a very isolated victory.

“So that’s why this Prophet (to whom he read the memoir ‘Friends in a Ship’), this new friendship is very important to me. When this news came I had somebody to share it with. Someone who was waiting with, ‘I think this is going to work out.’ I had stopped believing. I was just writing.

“So that’s it. I stopped believing.”

Amatesiro, who had been laughing all through the interview, suddenly looks and sounds very unhappy. I say, It’s OK. “You didn’t have to stop believing.”

And he laughs.

As we were going to press, we learned that Binyavanga Wainaina had passed. Amatesiro immediately attached this tribute, which follows this interview.

The Binj

by Amatesiro Dore

At a reading about 2010: A Igoni Barrett, Amatesiro Dore, Binyavanga Wainaina

Binyavanga paid the ultimate price for loving, giving, and sharing. We failed him at the end. All of us: none without sin against this great man. We disrespected him every chance we got. Took advantage of his heart, childishness and need for love, understanding and community. A litany of insults, see-finish and forgetfulness from his WhatsApp messages, Facebook chats, and Twitter DMs will reveal a man in love with the world, living a life in full and doing everything he was meant to do; and nothing less.

He wasn’t queer per se, not in this modern sexualized manner. He was an old virgin, almost asexual, before he met a woman and gradually grew into himself at old age. The first Kenyan I ever met: a skinny man who grew into a robust and utterly brilliant homosexual with the largest collection of African cuisine recipes ever collected in this millennium. At least now I can imagine how eccentric Dambudzo Marechera would have appeared before he died in the year of my birth.

God forbid. I’ll quit smoking, take the medications for my mind, and minimize my excesses by God’s grace.

There was only one Binj: the best uncle I never had, breaker of bars, best beer buddy, lover of hot Nigerian guys, Chibby’s best male friend and the best African reader in the world. He was the first editor to publish my work: Kwani? 06 (“Seven Yellow Brassieres for Fried Eggs,” (2010)). The first person I came out to in 2012 at the Lagos Resource Centre after I had refused to admit that fact in the presence of Chimamanda, Funmi Iyanda, Chika Unigwe, and Nathan Englander. I told him to shock him, to shame him, and to boast about the guy in love with me.

I was threatened by Binyavanga. He was Kenyan and more intelligent than any Nigerian in the literary scene. He spoke in paragraphs, never wrote trash, and always made sense even when drunk as fuck. He was fiercely loyal to Chimamanda, friends and any shit that attracted his attention. Yet I despised him: amazing guts, flamboyant gesticulations, and unprecedented audacity. He was more Nigerian than we Nigerians; a Fela who wrote like Morrison, not Soyinka; Kenya’s guarantee of a Nobel literary laureate before a sad and painful death that has made me so angry at the Binj for leaving without permission.

As a true Nigerian, I have decided to live longer and healthier by cutting down my alcohol intake, obeying doctors, and trying my best to preserve my support network.

“One Day This Man Will Get His Just Reward” highlights the ways in which Binyavanga Wainaina encouraged and supported speculative fiction by Africans.

Chapter fifteen will talk with writers in Accra and Kumasi, Ghana.

A Igoni Barrett, Amatesiro Dore and Binyavanga Wainaina at a reading in Lagos

The African literary world was dismayed to learn of the death of Binyavanga Wainaina on May 21, 2019 from stroke.

Time magazine in 2014 listed Binyavanga as one of the world’s hundred most influential people—for his writing, for his continued support of African arts, and for coming out as gay that year.

The story of his wide influence and charismatic character is being told on websites, on social media, and at a series of memorials being organized in Nairobi. This piece focuses on Binyavanga’s contributions to speculative fiction by Africans, while summarizing some of that wider story.

Binyavanga Wainaina won the Caine Prize back in 2002 for his story, “Discovering Home.” The money contributed to the functioning of the Kwani Trust and the Kwani? magazine, the collective labour of individuals such as Atsango Chesoni, Ebba Kalondo, Andia Kisia, Irene Wanjiru, Muthoni Wanyeki, and Rasna Warah.

For a time, the Trust published regular anthologies. At first edited by Binyavanga, then with Billy Kahora as managing editor, these became one of the most visible and authoritative literary ventures in Africa.

Kwani? was always open to speculative fiction—Mehul Gohil first came to attention in its pages, as did Amatesiro Dore, and Clifton Cachagua both as an author and then poetry editor.

Amatesiro added a memoir of Binyavanga to his forthcoming interview in Strange Horizons. In it he said:

He was the first editor to publish my work: Kwani? 06 [Seven Yellow Brassieres for Fried Eggs, (2010)]. The first person I came out to in 2012 at the Lagos Resource Centre...

He was more Nigerian than we Nigerians; a Fela who wrote like Morrison, not Soyinka; Kenyan’s guarantee of a Nobel literary laureate before a sad and painful death that has made me so angry at the Binj for leaving without permission.

The Kwani Trust was the first publisher of the masterpiece Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, a novel about a curse continuing from pre-colonial times. The novel won first place in the Kwani Manuscript Prize, and went on to win the Windham-Campbell Prize. Makumbi and I lived in the same city, and at the time she told me of Binyavanga’s kindness and support through a period of sudden success.

The Kwani Trust were also first publishers of Nikhil Singh’s extraordinary Taty Went West. It was a beautiful edition, with 145 of the author’s own illustrations. Other SFF-friendly authors such as Kiprop Kimutai benefitted from Kwani (he came in third in the Manuscript Project).

Billy Kahora worked as Kwani’s main editor for many years. Billy Kahora was also the editor of Imagine Africa 500, one of the best anthologies of African science fiction, published by Shadreck Chikoti. One of the most detailed and moving of the recent tributes to Binyavanga comes from Billy Kahora, just published in LitHub, where you can read the full and powerful text. Kahora notes:

He’d always have new obsessions, from the Leakeys and their legacy in Kenya to Nnedi Okorafor before she became well known. His advice was uncanny. Nobody understood African literary and cultural shifts better. He anticipated the Afro Futurism boom years before it happened.

And he started writing a fantasy novel in Germany at the DAAD fellowship in 2017.

So many authors speak of the personal help and encouragement given them by Binyavanga.

A Igoni Barrett met Binyavanga while organizing a reading series. In 2010, Binyavanga was a director of the Chinua Achebe Fellowship, and he encouraged Barrett to apply. Barrett got the fellowship, so was able to spend time out of Nigeria, in Nairobi. Barrett talks about what happened when he got home:

Then Binyavanga sent me an email. One of the conditions of the Fellowship was that I would send my work to them to show how I’d spent my time in Kenya. I had emailed my manuscript to Binyavanga, but I didn’t expect to hear from him. He’s a busy guy and even I don’t read every MS that comes into my inbox.

But about five days after, I get a phone call from a British number. I picked the call and it turns out to be Sarah Chalfant, head of the London office of the Wylie Agency.

Apparently Binyavanga had read my short story collection and liked it so much that he then emailed it to her and she’d read it and liked it so much that she offered to represent me.

Dare Segun Falawo met Binyavanga Wainaina through the Farafina Creative Writing Workshop. Binyavanga helped him over a personal crisis during the workshop, and wrote on behalf of Dare to help him find employment and publication. In a WhatsApp conversation Falowo wrote:

He was a firm believer in science fiction as a way to map the future and bring about utopia. He told me to write more science fiction, that was his main advice to me, the most repeated.

For the memorial observances in Nairobi, Falawo wrote a tribute that ended with a question that Binyavanga had asked the Workshop:

How do we face all in front of us, and still build imaginative homes of beauty? How are we more than just the sum of the problem, the history? How do we make our future beautiful, but not hiding from the fullness of our experience?

Binyavanga had a close friendship with Chimimanda Ngozie Adichie. They were both leaders of the Farafina Creative Writing workshops where he was able to touch so many young writers’ lives. Another workshop participant was Mazi Nwonwu, co-founder of Omenana magazine. Nwonwu not only notes Binyavanga’s personal help, but credits him with encouraging Omenana itself.

On the third day when Binyavanga came and asked, ‘what do you do?’ I said I write science fiction and fantasy and he was like, ‘wow I’ve been waiting for someone to say that in the workshop.’

Then we had a very big conversation within the workshop about speculative fiction in Nigeria and Africa, by then AfroSF (the first of the series edited by Ivor Hartmann) was about to come out and I had a story in it.

After meeting Binyavanga, I complained to him, ‘Look I write these stories but no one publishes’. By then I wasn’t writing spec-fic anymore; I was writing literary fiction.

He then said I should send him one of these stories and I did; then he asked why I was not writing them anymore; and I said ‘People don’t publish them!’

He said, ‘why don’t you create a portal?’, and I said that I had thought about that, maybe a Facebook page, and he said that I should do anything and let him know and then I went back and thought hard about it.

Ntone Edjabe is the key man in the Chimurenga collective. Edjabe gives Binyavanga Wainaina credit for inspiring Chimurenga to become an ongoing periodical and not just a one-off.

So Binyavanga sends me this story called 'Re-Discovering Home.' He had just gone back to Kenya, but we lived and worked together. He ran the café on the first floor. (Of the market building where they both worked.) So he goes back to Nairobi and writes this piece about homecoming. That gives me the feeling OK; we can do a second collection built around his piece. We call it Chimurenga Volume Two. Up to that point, I am not thinking of it as a periodical.

So it’s still 2002, a few months after the first volume. We’d get up to Volume Six and say OK, get the fuck out of here, we are running a magazine. So let’s just organize ourselves a little bit. ‘We’ are the first contributors and editors and designers.

Chimurenga was alert to the looming presence of Afrofuturism. In 2008 it published a double issue on black technology with speculative fiction by Peter Kalu, Doreen Baingana, Stacy Hardy, and one Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu.

In 2013 the Chimurenga newspaper The Chronic published Binyavanga’s interview with B Kojo Laing. It’s one of only three or four long searching interviews with this extraordinary Ghanaian author of interstitial and science fiction (B Kojo Laing passed in 2017, another recent loss).

Binyavanga was always a vocal supporter of speculative fiction. In a 2014 interview with Mazi Nwonwu published in This is Africa, he said:

I have a vested interest in this because I want to start a publishing house that will publish popular fiction and rethinking genre. Next year I want to host a workshop that will focus on creating good, digestible, thoughtful afrocentric speculative fiction in Senegal. Yes, the afrofuturism thing has become big.

When the next generation of Kenyan writers founded a publishing venue of their own, Jalada, the pan-African collective, Binyavanga, far from being threatened, graced their 2015 Afrofuture(s) anthology with a speculative story of his own, “Boonoonoonoos little bit Boonoonoonoos.”

The Prelude to Afrofuture(s), published in 2014, consisted entirely of Binyavanga’s wildly imaginative commentary on the work of artist Wangechi Mutu. The commentary, in the form of footnotes, is both an imagined biography of the artist and of Kenyan culture. Moses Kilolo, in the Endnote, says:

The Prelude which features Binyavanga Wainana’s profile of Wangeci Mutu and her art is a perfect expression of this shared dream among African artists to redefine how we envision future Africa.

In 2015 the judges for the anthology Africa39 were tasked with selecting the thirty-nine best sub-Saharan writers (in English). They selected from a longlist of writers that Binyavanga had drawn up. That this literary anthology included so much speculative work is down in part to him—the final selection included A Igoni Barrett, Mehul Gohil, Clifton Cachagua, and Shadreck Chikoti.

For all his good works, we have to hope that Binyavanga will be best remembered for his writing. The best way to get hold of his work is to go to the home page of the website PlanetBinya. His bitterly ironic short essay “How to Write About Africa” published in Granta in 2005 still resonates—though we have to hope it’s also done such a good job that most publishers have moved on. Indeed, The Guardian published a satire on how journalism was treating Africa in “How Not to Write About Africa in 2012.”

“How to Be an African” and another stinging piece of sarcasm attacks exoticization and appropriation Africans and African culture.

One Day I Will Write About This Place is his best-known longer work. It’s a memoir like no other, one that in places writes about the young Binyavanga as if he were a character in a novel. Granta also published an excerpt from One Day I will Write About this Place in 2011.

Finally of course there is the 2014 addition to One Day... published in both Chimurenga and Africa Is a Country in 2014. “I am a homosexual, mum” is subtitled ‘A lost chapter from One Day I Will Write About This Place.’ It transformed how many people read the memoir and thought of Binyavanga. His later acknowledgement of his HIV status also opened discussion and made things easier for others.

I remember him reading from the sequel to One Day I Will Write About This Place at the London School of Economics. The room was packed, mostly with Africans. The piece he chose was unlike anything I’d encountered—a kind of a memoir in which Binyavanga impersonated the stream of consciousness of his own father. The writing was laced with metaphors drawn from science. I remember Higgs Boson and quantum entanglements in the text.

Almost none of the questions from the audience were about the new work. It was all about his coming out. One angry lady asked him why he was talking about sex—Africans don’t talk about sex. “Oh of course not, no, never.” Binyavanga smiled and some of the audience laughed. “What African countries have you been to?” Some one asked why he had come out. His response was “citizenship”. He had returned to Kenya and felt that it was his civic duty. He was robust at fending off the questions, and seemed to have a reasonably fun time.

There must be about fifty million queer Africans (five percent of a billion people), but not one of them had written the extraordinary work we’d just heard. What he had to say about being queer in Africa was important. But being a spokesperson seemed to be crowding out his writing.

Afterwards I was able to talk briefly to him. I didn’t want to talk about Africa with a capital A or gay politics, so I asked him why he thought so many writers were using present tense instead of past tense.

“YouTube,” he said with no hesitation. “You can watch TV shows from your childhood. It makes everything present tense.” An off-the-cuff answer that was headspinning. The implication was that the internet was changing how we see time—a rather speculative idea.

We have to hope that that second volume of imaginative memoirs will be published. And please God a manuscript of that fantasy novel is found.

Ake Festival 2018: Wole, Dare Segun Falowo, T J Benson

There is so much more me than there was before.

And I know. I know so much more than each of us that make up this new and wonderful thing could possibly know with our collective cognition, collective memory. We have gained access to so much more. I know your mother does not approve of what I have done but I need you to understand why I have done it. Why you will eventually do it too. It is, when considered objectively, the natural progression of things. Besides, we have forced our own hand. That is perhaps my fault, at least in part, but I cannot say I am sorry for it.

Let me explain.

First, the What of things.

In the beginning was the void and the void was a scalar field and quantized particle duality in which all the mass of our universe resided, characterised by the random quantum fluctuation that is fundamental to all things. One such strange and wonderful fluctuation led to a phase transition and a release of potential energy—a glorious and beautiful explosion throwing all matter and energy into violent existence. Galaxies were born. Astronomical objects crystallised. The universe groaned with the glory of motherhood. In the protoplanetary disk of dust grains surrounding what would eventually become our own lovely yellow Sun, complex organic molecules that would become proteins were woven together, as elements sought solace with one another in the cold and darkness of space. Eventually, dust called unto dust and our planet came to be—its outside cooling to a hard crust like cosmic creme brulee. And when the crust was hard and thick and the steam had cooled to water, abiogenesis began in a warm little pool, filled with ammonia and salts and light and heat. In this primordial pool, individual proteins underwent complex and wonderful changes, the compounds binding themselves to one another and creating independent but connected systems until they became something far more than the sum of their parts. They became first in a chain that would eventually lead to us.

Yesterday, I took a long walk through the streets of Surulere, considering the thing I was about to do. I watched a queue of young men in skinny jeans and wide-eyed girls with smooth skin and braided hair file into BRT buses. I observed the portly market women who sell roasted fish by the roadside laugh boisterously as they traded gossip. I saw a family of four filled with faithful joy walking back from mid-week Church service stop at the Mr Biggs right next to the Aduraede street fuel station to share a meal. I watched the cars zoom and the dogs run and the flies buzz and the grass sway and rats scurry. I saw the wonderful urban ecosystem that is Lagos and I knew that I was doing the right thing because this is what each of us, each droplet of self-awareness that makes up the ocean of humanity, has always attempted to do. It is the same thing those first complex organic molecules stranded on a strange dust cloud in the emptiness of early space, did. Connect. Become more than the sum of our parts. All of our families, our cities, our social networks, our empires, our cultures, our religions, our socio-political structures serve this one purpose, even if inefficiently: to try to connect us, one consciousness to another, to try to make us more than we are.

From “When We Dream We Are Our God”

Wole Talabi has worked in Mexico, is now posted to Malaysia, and goes scuba diving whenever he can manage.

He is remembered by a generation of Nigerian writers as The Alchemist, the fiction editor for a blog called The Naked Convos, back when the current wave of speculative fiction was first finding its feet.

This interview happened at the Caine Prize festivities in London, July 2018 because Wole’s story “Wednesday’s Story” was nominated for the prestigious award. In November 2018 another one of his stories, “The Regression Test”, first published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, won the Nommo Award.

Yet, the story he asked to be excerpted above was one of his more obscure pieces, published bilingually in a Norwegian magazine. It also closes his forthcoming single-author collection, Incomplete Solutions.

Wole: “The title of the story is ‘When We Dream We Are Our God.’ Humanity makes ourselves into a type of god by networking ourselves together. In the story, two things happen. We network ourselves and then we connect to a super computer to negotiate with it.

“You know how this thing about the Singularity ... you know, the machines are going to become super intelligent and kill all of us. I have a different opinion. And the story is my opinion. They won’t give a shit about us at all.

“It’s a very engineering way of looking at things, but that’s what I do. I’m an engineer. If you think of humanity as a machine or as a system or anything, our biggest problem is we have no group objective. You can’t be efficient and you can’t be optimized and you can’t be improved if you have no objective.

“I do this for a living where you construct complex objective functions that have uncertainty built into them.

“The people who do this the most, this optimisation of multiple functions, are economists. If you are trying to build interesting modern models—interesting to me—it’s not just maximizing profits. How do you maximize profit while maximizing employee happiness, while minimizing the risks to the business, without destroying the environment but maintaining good public opinion?”

GR: “You are at core a science fiction writer.”

Wole: “Yes. Even before I was writing. These are the kinds of discussions I used to have with my dad, with my friends. I used to read a lot of this kind of science fiction—Asimov, Clarke, Philip K. Dick ...

“Random evenings my dad and I would watch something on the Discovery Channel and through the program we wouldn’t say anything, and then we’d discuss it for hours. I remember we watched a show on the development of tanks during World War One. And then we would talk about how technology affected the war.

“Me and my Dad used to talk about how the history of technology is the history of humanity in many ways. Because unfortunately the moment we come out with a new technology, the next thing is ‘How do we use it to oppress other people?’ And there’s a war, and there’s a struggle. And out of that there’s a new equilibrium that arises until there’s another technological shift and then everything resets.

“My dad was a chemical engineer. He used to work for the Delta Steel Company. I lived in a steel township right next door to the steel plant. It was fun. I don’t have any bad memories of the plant. It was just this big box with four huge stacks with smoke coming out. It was in Warri, yeah.

“I went to the local primary school there, then secondary school in a different state, then university in a different state. So we hopped around a bit. We moved from Warri to Benin. They have a whole bunch of languages in Benin. Same with Warri as well. But then I went to university in Ife. And my mom moved to Port Harcourt a while and I stayed with her. And also in Abuja.

“Abuja is dull, but at least it’s organized. Port Harcourt, I didn’t like it. The roads are terrible. The weather was not great. Lagos is Lagos. It’s a mad city. Ife was interesting. It’s supposed to be the cradle of mankind. In Yoruba mythology anyway. When you’re there it doesn’t seem like it (Laughs).

“I have two brothers, one younger, one older. My older brother does business. He studied accounting; he has an MBA, that’s his thing. My younger brother is more artistic, plays piano.”

I ask if his early reading influenced him.

Wole: “In primary school, probably not. I didn’t feel like I was going to write in primary school. I was always reading. That’s been consistent. I read everything. My mom used to complain that I read my dad’s entire encyclopaedia collection from A to Z. I have a bad habit of wanting to try to figure things out, and if I can’t, I try. I’ll try to understand almost anything.

“I remember reading Cyprian Ekwensi. I slipped that in. Florence Mwapa. A lot of Enid Blyton.”

GR: “Enid f**** Blyton”

 Wole: (Laughs) “It was everywhere.”

GR: “I guess it’s an inspiration, but I bet it turned more Nigerian kids from ever reading anything again than it turned on. I say chaps. You silly girl.”

 Wole: “I think things like The Famous Five, yeah, because you can’t relate. Things like The Magic Faraway Tree, those hyper-imaginative things were easier to relate to.

“We had books of folktales as well. I really don’t remember who by. I remember I had a collection of Nigerian folk tales and I remember thinking how similar some of the Enid Blyton stuff was to that.”

He didn’t read much Yoruba literature like Fagunwa or Tutuola and only discovered them about ten years ago.

Wole: “My parents were from nearby villages; they both spoke perfect Yoruba. They were both from Jabu. Jabu—it depends on who you talk to—but they are typical, proper Yoruba people.

“My family always used to make fun of me and my older brother because we couldn’t speak Yoruba. But growing up in Warri, it was never a priority and my parents never spoke it to us, they never pushed for it. It just didn’t stick. Later I realized that even it they’d tried with me it might not have worked me. Because I am shit at learning languages. And I have tried.

“I lived in Mexico for three months and I took classes every day. I was attending two hours full immersion. Your teacher teaches you in Spanish from day one, they don’t speak English to you. I picked it up because I had to. At one point I was getting around the country by myself with out any help because I’d learned enough. Within two weeks of coming back to the UK, 90 percent of it was gone. Two years later 99 percent of it was gone.

“I was in Mexico for work. They sent me there to help with a project for three months. It wasn’t a very interesting project but it was a good experience. I was reviewing some data on an oil field, forty years of history, all in Spanish. The company was trying to decide if they wanted to invest in reactivating the field and produce more from it.

“I was working with a team to gather information to see if it was worth making that decision. In Villahermosa, in the south of the country. There’s lots of natural beauty around it. You take buses into the countryside around it and there’s this waterfall called Aqua Azul. The water supposed to have five different colours of blue on levels of the waterfall. It’s not true. With the right sunlight maybe.

“I like travelling. I still travel quite a bit. I don’t stay long. Most of my travelling is for holidays now, two weeks at most. I wish I could do more, staying three months, six months. Unfortunately the business has changed, so there’s not as much travel.

“I work for an oil services company. The part that I work with is the part that provides software and technical consulting. That’s what I do, consulting, software, development, design, teaching people how to use the software or sometimes the underlying physics.

“I started working here in the UK, Oxford. Mexico, then back here, and then Malaysia. I was just starting to write and publish with external magazines. All my writing had been with The Naked Convos up until to that point. It was 2012 or ’13.

“I mean I actually studied here (the UK) in 2010 to 2011. And then started working 2012. I did my MSc here (in the UK, at Imperial College).”

GR: “You got a distinction.”

Wole: “After a year of hell. Of suffering. (Laughs) I want to get a PhD. I want to be Doctor. I think it sounds cool. That’s my entire reason for wanting a PhD is just so that people can call me Dr Talabi. (Laughs). It might almost be worth the three years of my life it would take.

“Malaysia is the first long-term posting. But eventually I know they are going to move me somewhere. I don’t know where. I have no idea what I’m going to be doing but just like Mexico, I’ll figure it out when I get there.”

While he was in Malaysia, scuba-diving became one of his hobbies.

Wole: “It reminds me a bit of what I imagine being in space would be like. Malaysia has good diving. And Thailand, the Philippines, any place I travel to, I just ask where is there a good place to go diving. Two weeks ago I was diving in Tanzania. And apparently Kenya has good diving so when I go there I’ll probably do that. Arthur C. Clarke was a diver as well. He wrote books about it. Maybe one day I’ll go diving in Sri Lanka where he used to live.

“There’s a lot of festivals (in Malaysia) and I find it interesting going to the festivals and observing what they do, what the rituals are, what the stories are. Growing up in Nigeria it’s easy to imagine that there are only two ways of looking at faith and the world. The average Nigerian is like ‘There’s Christianity, there’s Islam, and there’s the traditional religions and that’s it.’ But so many cultures have their own entire mythologies that they are very dedicated to. They have these rich stories behind them.

“I keep saying I’m not really a fantasy person. I don’t read much of it. I read mostly science fiction. I used to read a lot of fantasy when I was in high school but then I got frustrated. Just random books you would pick up in these pop-up bookshops, people selling books on the road. And the books had cool covers, ‘There’s magic, there’s a dragon, I’ll take it.’ But a lot of fantasy novels are in series, and in that kind of informal bookshop you might never find book one or book two or book seven. You like the story and you can never finish it.

“Science fiction tends to do one-off novels. So I gravitated towards science fiction, and short stories, specifically anthologies. I used to pick up a lot of them.

“The Hugo nominees, the ones edited by Isaac Asimov. I think I read all of them. I think they used to combine the Hugo and Nebula nominees into one book? You’d have a foreword and an introduction to each story; they were usually kind of funny. I think the last one was 1993 when he died? So I used to desperately look for those.

“Actually Isaac Asimov had a huge impact on me. I used to read his non-fiction as well. I remember there was the Encyclopaedia of Science and Technology, which charted the history of science from ancient to modern times with short biographies of everyone including the Arab philosophers and the Chinese. And they were funny; he was a funny guy.

Wole at Africa Writes, July 2018

“When I was growing up my parents were just ‘Speak proper English. You learn your math, you learn your science, your philosophy.’ That was what was important. Because we lived in a steel town, which was an estate. Everybody that lived in the town was all working in the plant. Our neighbourhood was all engineers or management, very middle class.

“You didn’t get people who spoke Pidgin. You didn’t have people selling stuff on the street. A lot of that I wasn’t exposed to until I was ten or eleven. And I distinctly remember being really young like being eight and having ... there used to be periods when they would let local people into the estate to sell things. One of the popular things was palm wine. And I distinctively remember the guy selling palm wine speaking Pidgin English. Leaving that little steel town is when I was exposed to a lot more. In my head, my voice is very Standard English. That’s how I talk. That’s how I imagine people talking. That’s how a lot of people I know (talk).

“A lot of my friends tend to be fairly high-minded people talking about science and philosophy, even from primary school. We’re all nerds. I gravitated to the nerd crowd and that’s what we talked about. That’s the natural voice in my head. But recently I’ve started trying alternative voices. Mostly including Yoruba, which I’m very uncomfortable with. I don’t speak it well at all. I don’t even speak it to people. I can understand ... some. I have family conversations where people speak to me in Yoruba and I respond in English.”

I ask about his writing.

Wole: “My first story for Omenana was ‘Crocodile Ark’ which started as weird experiment. I had the opening for the story but I didn’t know what to do with it, so I sent that opening to Suyi Davies for him to finish it. I think I did it like a competition. Three people tried to finish the story and I read what they’d done and they were all interesting, but not where I would have gone with it. So then I took the story back and wrote what I would have done with it. That was just around the time that Omenana first appeared so I thought ‘Yeah, send it to them. Yeah, support them.’

“It was my first story I sent them, and I liked the response I got. ‘We like it, here’s some feedback.’ Chinelo (Onwualu) is a really good editor. I was like, ‘OK. They’re just setting up, but they’re on the right track, they’re professional about it. So I have it in my head to keep supporting them. Try to send something once a year at least, an article or a story. They’ve just started paying, but I’m like ‘Just keep the money; give it to someone else. Keep going.’ I’m a big fan.”

 GR: “The story ‘A Short History of Migration in Five Fragments of You’ follows a family history, starting with slavery and ending up with a journey to the moon Europa.”

Wole: “I tend to think of how to step outside humanity a little bit and think big picture. Sometimes it’s good to step back and say, there is the whole of humanity itself, which can be considered as one thing. There’s little streams and flows and connecting threads within that.”

Wole curates a database of published SFF by Africans on the ASFS website. We talk about how in 2017 there were about one hundred works published and roughly two-thirds of them were fantasy. Very little science fiction is being written.

Wole: “I agree. But you can’t tell people what to write. I do personally wish there was more genuine speculation about the future, constructing a new one. Yeah sure you can write about Mami Wata and the Ogbanje. And you can construct interesting stories. But what comes after?”

GR: “Someone said that too much African science fiction seems to ask the question ‘When do we get to be New York?’”

Wole: “These terms ‘developed world’ versus ‘developing world’ are designed to put your mind in that trap. That tells you that you are trying to be like the West as opposed to leapfrogging or taking the parts that do work, and come up with our own knowledge systems to come up with something new.

“There’s a whole system designed to make you think that the only future for African cities or peoples or cultures is to achieve what other so-called developed countries have. It’s an extremely limited view. Unfortunately it’s a response to colonialism, or what people call neo-colonialism, which is like (chuckles) colonialism by proxy. It’s remote colonialism from afar with the culture and the terminology and the attitude. Your mind cannot see past it.”

One of Wole’s stories, ’Home Is Where My Mothers Heart Is Buried’ is only available in print from FIYAH! magazine. It’s set on a terraformed Mars and echoes how some Nigerians have very mixed feelings about home.

Wole: “It’s very much a diaspora story. I started writing that when I was living here in London and I met a lot of other Nigerians, a lot people wanted to go back but they were very conflicted.

“Many classes of Nigerians come here for different reasons—to study, to work whatever. And they get to a point where they have to decide: do we want to go back or do we stay and make a life here? And there’s always arguments in every direction and everybody makes a different decision.

“To people who didn’t undergo too much hardship, you come from an upper class or middle class family. Your parents pay your school fees; you come to a nice university like Cambridge or whatever. You finish. Going back for you is natural. Going back, things are fun, you’ve only ever known Nigeria in a positive way. You have your personal driver; a maid or two; you have security. It’s all about parties and clubs. Fun.

“Then there’s people who had to struggle to get a scholarship or beg their uncle to get money so they could survive while they are here. Maybe their parents died and they had to spend six, seven years gathering money to make it out. People like that just ... to them Nigeria represents a sentiment of wanting to go back but it represents loss.

“Another thing Nigerians are very big on is family. What if you had two people from the same family on these opposite sides of feeling? Mostly because one of them was older when the bad stuff happened so she saw it and the other was just a child, so to her Nigeria is just that fun place where the people she grew up and played with as a kid still are. The story is about that conflict. It’s a lot of talking and disagreement.”

We start talking about his latest story ‘The Harmonic Resonance of Ejiro Anabohri’ in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but basically all the key points were well covered by the interview he did on publication with F&SF. He emphasizes now how much of the story came out of his own childhood.

 Wole: “To be honest, it’s a semi-fictional version of my own childhood. Ejiro is living in an oil-industry camp like the steel camp I grew up in. The books are the books I read. The TV shows are the TV shows I watched. The Princess Bride is one of my favourite things. My brother and me watched that movie maybe a hundred times. Also the things you’d do also show up in the story—your parents would send out to grind pepper. Taking shortcuts through the bush, that’s normal

“Personally, I started writing for fun. I wasn’t looking for validation from anybody. A lot of it was me playing around with interesting ideas. There was this whole period in between 2008 and 2013 where there was a lot of blogging in Nigeria and people just, like, writing stuff. The entire audience was Nigerian and other bloggers or Nigerians living abroad.

“You would share stories and give feedback and you didn’t have to explain anything to them, so that’s kind of where I got into writing from. Nobody cared if your spelling was right or your punctuation was right. If it was a cool idea they would share it with their friends and you’d get five hundred, or a thousand views. That was a nice thing. And that’s all there was.

“It was only later that I starting thinking that I could go first semi-professional and then professional.   I still have the same sense that if it’s not fun then what’s the point? If you’re having to stop a story cold to deconstruct Amala or Eba for some Western reader, then what are you doing?

“I think I’ve been lucky in that most of the Western magazines I’ve submitted to have good editors. I think Charlie at F&SF is extremely underrated. I don’t know why he doesn’t have three or four Hugos for best editor. Charlie’s rejections helped me more than a lot of acceptances I got from other people.

“Back then I had my own blog, which I was just writing stuff on ... travel, personal stuff, fiction. One of the most popular blogs was run by my friend Wale Adetula. He wrote mostly—I’m not sure what to call it but I guess the technical term is sensationalist fiction, romantic stories, crime stories, anything that got people reading, so his blog was really popular.

“Then he read one of the stories I wrote which was this weird kind of horror thing. He asked me to write something for his blog. And so I did, and then other people guest-wrote on the blog. Thinking back on it a bit, his blog became the central one that pulled everyone else’s in. I think back then it was called The Toolsman’s Blog. It’s what eventually became The Naked Convos. Then he tried to make it an online magazine, which is what it is now.”

GR: “And it’s very mainstream these days.”

Wole: “There was like a peak period for me. I haven’t been very much involved since. But it was on that blog that guest-writing happened. Lots of people guest-wrote there. Edwin (Okolo) did some stuff, Dare (Segun Falowo) did some stuff.

“We had like an online writing reality competition where people would get eliminated every week. The audience would vote for their favourite stories. I was like a ghost judge for that, helping to set it up, reading the submissions for people who wanted to be on the show.

“That’s the first place I read Kofi Nyameye’s work. I remember this really snappy story about a zombie invasion in Ghana. I remember my visceral reaction to that was ‘This guy gets in. I don’t care what you guys think, this guy is in.’

“And Suyi as well, Suyi Davies applied and I’m the one who forced that through. Basically any horror, science fiction, or fantasy that was written well, I was like, they’re in.”

Wole is being modest. The Alchemist’s Corner was a regular part of The Naked Convos that featured experimental and weird fiction, and Wole was editor under the pseudonym of The Alchemist.

Wole: “I used to try to get guest writers. That whole process was how I was introduced to a lot of people. We were quite active at The Naked Convos in looking for people who were writing good stuff on their on blog and then trying to get to a bigger audience. Of course that helped us too because good fiction got in more readers.

“I would say that was between 2010 and 2013. I think maybe before that there were some older platforms that I was never a part of. Like Mazi Nwonwu’s story ‘Rain’, also in Naijastories around 2010. I think people start from blogging and you get a response and you think ‘Oh maybe I could do something more with this.’

“It was a good period but then you start to realize that it’s one thing just to whip out something from your brain that’s kind of cool but it’s another thing to edit it properly, make sure the plot you had in your head comes across. We were all stumbling through. Good first drafts were what were getting published.

“And as you go on, you start to realize that if you want to improve, it takes time and effort. You can’t write one post every week or month, like we were doing with blogging. You need to sit down and edit. Once you are putting in that kind of time-effort, you want to be rewarded for it.

“Most of these online platforms have not figured out how to pay writers. So then you start thinking ‘Who does pay?’ And that’s when you start finding Western magazines.

“I think we’re still ... African science fiction ... I think we still don’t have an aesthetic. I’m slightly concerned that when most people think of African science fiction, they think science fantasy, but the fantasy element is based on African traditions.

“There’s some cool science stuff out there as well. But a lot of it is surface level. That’s it. There’s very little big-idea science fiction. So. I don’t know how to encourage a different approach.

“I’m still struggling to figure out if there genuinely is interest in real science fiction around. I don’t like that term ‘real science fiction’, but to clarify, I mean the kind of science fiction where you actually, genuinely think through the technological development and social/political repercussions, build a world and then put a story there. One example I really like is Nnedi’s ‘Spider the Artist’. To be honest with you, I haven’t seen much else like it.”

Out of the blue, Wole says something that takes me by surprise, particularly as he emerged as someone who set a strong tone of mutual support and respect among all the Caine Prize nominees.

Wole: “I’m not very good at reading people. No I’m not. I’ve been told that. I guess it’s true I mean if you tell me there’s something I will see it. Some people have this very strong sense of empathy. They can tell when their friend is having issues or worried about something. I can’t.

“It’s very weird to say this, but based on discussion with friends, people say I have a very small ego. When I was managing a team, sometime I would do something but I would let the team members take the credit. It’s this sense of a natural tendency to want to support people but not specifically out of empathy but more out of ... I don’t know ... more of a sense of that’s how it should be.

“I think ... (Pause) I like humanity as a group. But maybe I don’t like individual people. I see individual people but when other people think of humanity they think of individuals, specifically they think of their father, their friend, their brother. I think big and then zoom in.

“So to me, being nice to people is just how I wish all of humanity was. So it’s my default mode. But that very deep caring about one specific person? That’s something I have to work on. It doesn’t come naturally to me. Being good to a group, wanting the best for a group, supporting people. To me that should be natural. We are one organism. It’s humanity. That’s how I think about it.”

Wole before a Caine Prize-related panel

Mame Bougouma Diene

Dr. Salio Sanogo picked up the small scalpel from the table, and dipped it in rubbing alcohol before turning to the young girl lying unconscious on the operating table inside his clinic in Seledougou, and slicing the mangled skin covering her vagina.

She had Type III FGM, infibulation. The edges of her vulva had been almost completely stitched together to prevent intercourse. She could never pee properly and it was badly infected. She had run away from her village, and stumbled upon him somehow. How she’d managed to find them through the pain was beyond him.

Dr. Salio knew first hand that good people attracted bad things in the way breasts attract idiots. Little girls could be mischievous, if not downright evil in their efforts to redirect chaos, but youth was an excuse for itself, and, ready to carefully draw the young woman’s clitoris out from under the trauma inflicted on her, he also knew that none so young could have earned this through any kind of guilt, past or future.

“Stephanie, see how the excision was performed all the way up here, but she was sown way down to here?” Dr. Salio asked the young Belgian intern, as he finished slicing the skin open.

“That’s why she had difficulty peeing?”

“Yes. The hole is too small, much too small, so the urine pushed out through the skin.”

“Can you help her, Doctor?”

“Yes, we’re lucky, look,” he said pulling apart the undamaged lips under the sowing. “It didn’t mutilate her organ per se, it’s almost intact, and see,” he opened the scar tissue entirely “her clitoris is still right here, all we have to do is pull a little…” he turned to the nurse standing by the bed, adjusting the girl’s IV drip. “Satou, check that she is still sedated enough, we only need thirty minutes.”

“We’ve already given her all the sedatives we could, doctor.” Nurse Aïssatou responded “Her body rejects them; you will have to be quick.”

It wasn’t her body rejecting the sedatives, it was her brain. She wanted this done, she needed this done, but all the same she hated anything foreign done to her. Again. She would need a lot of care, and some time away, to rest and for no one to find her.

He drew a deep breath, staring through the mosquito net surrounding the table at the slightly cracked paint on the ceiling, and the tiny dried bloodstains on the wall, still holding little bits of wings and limbs from smashed bugs, wiped his forehead, and proceeded to drawing out the young girl’s clitoris out, a thousandth of an inch at a time.

Thirty minutes stretched into eternity.

And then it was over.

“We’re done here, hé.” Salio said, handing the scalpel to Stephanie. “Satou can you please clean the blood, and have her covered. Let her rest, when she recovers have Stephanie check on her every two hours for the next…”

“Doctor! Doctor!” A young boy barged into the clinic shouting, earning a grunt from the young girl resting from the surgery, “The Unwomen are here! The Unwomen are here!”

The who…

“You mean the U.N Women, Amadou?”

“Yes Doctor,” he grinned, scratching the back of his head. “The UN women. And they have cameras and a truck for you!”

For me…

Work was starting to get to him. He had promised them an interview, but no one had said anything about cameras and a truck.

“Well, they do fund part of the clinic…Stephanie, check on her every two hours for the next day, keep her hydrated. I have to head for Bamako tomorrow, a presentation at Save the Children, but I’ll back in forty-eight hours. Satou, think you can handle the clinic without me?”

“Sure Doc. You go and raise the funding we need, and have yourself a proper steak and bed, then come back here, hé? We have work to do.”

“Yes, Nurse Diawara,” he said, snapping a smart salute and earning a frown, and walked out of the clinic behind Amadou.

- 'Fistulas', from Dark Moon Rising on a Starless Night 

Chatting with Mame Bougouma Diene, you are likely to have your head spun in a whirlwind of references to places he’s worked in all over the world—Israel, Bangladesh, Niger, Nigeria, France and the USA.

But first, let’s get his name right.

It’s pronounced something like Mahm BooGOOma Dee-en.

Mame: “I’m named after my great grandfather. When my father named me after him he had to call me Mame, because Mame means grandfather/grandmother.

“Bougouma is actually the name. Bougouma means ‘I don’t want to’ because in traditional families in Senegal, if you lose the first child, to ward off the curse of losing the second one you give him a name that is a little bit off the mark because you don’t want to lose him.

“It’s in Wolof, which is the main language spoken in Senegal. There’s thirty-six languages spoken in Senegal, but that’s the most widely spoken. It’s the national language. French is still the official language but it is losing ground, which is both a good and a bad thing.

“‘Diene’ means ‘fish.’ Well it doesn’t actually mean fish but it’s so close phonetically that people hear it as that. So my name means ‘Grandfather Doesn’t Want Fish.’ Which is crazy considering that my ethnic group on my father’s side are fishermen. The Lebou people.”

Mame’s Nommo-nominated novella Hell Freezes Over is about future peoples taking on the characteristics of different kinds of animals. It focuses on an ethnic group that explores underwater and merges psychologically with fish. So I ask him if his name helped inspire it.

Mame: “No, no, not all. We were just sitting around with a bunch of friends in Paris, kicking around ideas for a movie, and I wanted to write about climate change that happens in the in-between period. Not the cataclysms per se, but what happens before another cataclysm happens, how would people adapt? I was kind of sitting on it for about a year. I had the first line in my head but never did anything with it.

“Then one day I was back from Tel Aviv after volunteering with African refugees there and I thought, ‘Now OK I know what this story’s about,’ and I wrote the first part in maybe four days—fifteen thousand words, something like that.

“Then I figured, ‘OK I’ll write a sequel that’s actually a prequel,’ and I ended up finishing it maybe nine months later when I was in Niger working for IOM [the International Organization for Migration.] The two stories together were 35,000 words. ‘Hell or High Water’ was the original story and the prequel was ‘Hell or High Lava.’

“I was sitting there with this 35,000-word story that I had no idea what to do with. And I landed on Ivor Hartmann’s call for submissions (for the second volume of AfroSF). I just sent it on the off chance that he might do something with it.

“Two weeks later he gets back at me, and it starts the same way as every single email you get: ‘Dear Mame, thanks for sending me your story,’ and I’m thinking, ‘F*** he’s going to reject it too,’ and next thing you know he says, ‘I really liked it. I’m going to publish it. I’ll get back at you in a couple of weeks.’ And that gave me the courage to keep writing. The fact that he said, ‘I like your work’ meant I thought ‘I can actually do this.’

“Next thing you know I was submitting to Omenana, and that also was on Ivor’s recommendation, ‘There’s this great new thing coming up,’ and Chinelo (Onwualu) gets back at me and she’s like, ‘That’s an awesome idea, but you need to flesh that story out, change it this way and that and get back at me in a couple of months.’ I did that and she said, ‘Great I’m going to publish you.’

“So Ivor was my first break. It took a while to deliver with AfroSFv2 for a variety of reasons. One of the beautiful ones was that he was getting married. So the story in Omenana came out first.”

Hell Freezes Over was nominated for a Nommo Award.

Mame: “The Nommo nomination was a huge surprise. I guess everybody goes through the same process. You really love what you’ve written and then you get to work on the edits for a year, and you are sick and tired of the stupid thing.

“‘It’s done, I don’t want to see it any more, I don’t want anyone to talk to me about it.’

“I was up with guys like Tade (Thompson) and Nick (Wood) who are absolutely f****** incredible. Dilman (Dila) who’s amazing and I was like, ‘Wow, that I’m in the same book as these guys with my novella is awesome.’ It got mixed reviews, but this one guy who was reviewing it in The Guardian liked it the best of the novellas.”

I admit that the first time I read the story I didn’t fully get it. Are the protagonists physically like these animals or are they just adopting their survival techniques? And then they dream themselves into the fish as they farm the last cities flooded underwater.

Mame: “It really kind of happened in a vision, to be honest. I had that first line, ‘They still talk about the storms.’ And then something clicked. I just started seeing these people, and I started thinking what would happen if humanity had to divide itself into castes. What happens when you build some kind of mental connection with another species?”

The Fish caste at first appear to be the heroes, with the Mole caste working against them.

Mame: “You don’t have one caste wanting to exterminate the other for no reason at all. The Moles look like complete assholes in ‘Hell or High Water.’ But how did they get to be in that position? Why would they have so much resentment against the Fish? And I thought, maybe they come from a slave caste that eventually came into power. What happens when you have that reversal of roles? Clearly the Moles have gone through a lot of shit too.

“The sequel is actually the prequel. It’s tricky to follow. I really f***** with the timeline. That wasn’t really planned, but then I’m a huge fan of Dune, and a lot of it is cryptic, ten-thousand-year leaps into the future, starting in the future of a future. You can’t understand Dune until you read the prequels (written by his son and Kevin J, Anderson): they set the context for a world without artificial intelligence, dependent on physical and mental mutations. Hell Freezes Over has some of that in the sense that you can’t take things for granted without knowing the backstory.”

I ask what he’s writing now.

Mame: “A lot of stuff is happening now actually. I’m working with Ivor again for AfroSFv3. Coming out next year. [AfroSFv3 has just appeared in December 2018.]

“The story ‘Underworld 101’ is getting reprinted by Rosarium. I’m working with Clash Media who released the Wu-Tang Tribute Anthology last year and the editor Christoph Paul, he’s going to be releasing a collection of mine, four novelettes and one short novella. The working title for that collection now is Dark Moons Rising on a Starless Night. We’re still discussing it and working on the cover. All the stories in the collection are new. All horror with an anti-colonial twist.

“Christoph has won several awards. He’s been giving creative writing classes. He writes Bizarro fiction. A lot of the stuff I write borders on Bizarro. I find it to be a very liberating genre, like Robert Rodriguez movies, you can go nuts, unconventional and experimental.

“Three of them [the stories in the collection] revolve around themes in Africa. One about is about genital mutilation. The other is called ‘Popobowa.’ It’s about a Tanzanian monster. I’m kind of contextualizing it in the anti-gay backlash in Uganda a couple of years back.

“Another story is about a little girl I knew in Bangladesh and who I was supporting after I left the Peace Corps, and who ended up killing herself a few years later when I quit my job. She was the most important person in the world to me. Her passing changed who I am. There’s definitely a light that died after she passed.

“Obviously it was a bit of a cathartic story for me, trying to capture who she was, getting that out into the world and what she meant to me. It’s also speculative, but along the lines of Hindu mysticism.

“The fourth story is called ‘Black and Gold.’ Right now there are possibilities of offshore exploration for oil off the coast of Senegal. The story is based around that but also looking into the guiding spirits in my father’s ethnic group. Every single outpost along the coast has a different protective spirit.

“All these groups speak Wolof. It’s a difference in culture because the Lebou are fishermen. They live along the coasts so they go out for days at sea on those small fishing boats. Some of those names are very typical of the Lebou subculture. So if you say Diene they will say, ‘oh you are Lebou’ because that is one of the most prototypical names.

“When I was a child, we would visit Senegal. Whenever it was six or six-thirty, twilight, my dad would just pull us off the beach and back into our rooms and say, ‘You can’t be out at this time.’ And the reason was, traditionally, at that time, the spirit is walking the beach. He may be benevolent, he may not be. You don’t know. So you don’t want to be in his face when he’s out there. That’s one of the things that marked me as a child, the overlap between the physical and spiritual world.”

We talk about his unusual writing process.

Mame: “I used to write on my computer. I spent a couple of years where I was unemployed, looking for a job, going through a freaking depression. Super-dark moments. I don’t even know how to explain it.

“But that was when I started to produce massive volumes of writing, pouring these stories out, and thinking there is no limit to what you can do as a writer. And then my computer got wet and crashed. Thank God the hard drive was safe. I had the story for AfroSFv3 that was pouring out too. ‘This is genius. I got this I got this.’ Then I bought this shitty computer in Mexico and that ended up crashing too.

“Now I’m writing on the subway on my way to work on my Android phone. And the funny thing is that I got so used to writing on my Android that I can’t write on a computer any more. I can do my editing on my computer.

“I found the Android so liberating. I could be on the bus typing it up. I could be in the bathroom and keep writing. Sometimes you catch people on the bus reading over your shoulder. ‘What is this guy on? What is he doing?’ I get home and I’ve typed 700 words.

“There’s something my head that says, ‘I’m going to finish this story. I got to get that story out.’ I’m reading Rachel Zadok’s interview and she’s going, yeah I got a full time job, a husband and two kids. I write whenever I can. I find the time. It’s condescending for people to say, ‘Oh, I wish I could find the time to do what you do.’ As if you were some kind of freaking vagrant bohemian with the luxury to be this creative person.”

I ask him to flesh out his biography.

Mame: “I was born in the US. My father is Senegalese. My mother is French, but mixed Senegalese on her father’s side. I moved to France when I was a kid. My Dad used to work for the United Nations. He was always travelling, doing all kinds of incredibly interesting cultural things.

“He and my mother are the people who turned me on to science fiction, and at a very young age. They had me sit and watch Dune. ‘You need to go to bed, but you want to sit and watch this first.’ They had read the books and were coming from that perspective.

“My dad used to read us all kinds of myths and legends, be it Vikings or Knights of the Round Table or Hindu mythology. So that was the literary upbringing we had as kids, me and my brothers. My Dad was always travelling, and that gave me a kind of wanderlust.

“I want to see a lot of the world, but I also want to be able to support my family who are still in Africa. I always thought if I do international stuff, I’d be able to do that. Not just help them but also other people in developing countries.

“Eventually it happened kind of organically. I was in the States (from France) for college. Was in Paris for about a year and a half. Joined the Peace Corps; I was in Bangladesh for two years. I visited Thailand while I was there.

“I thought, ‘OK. I really like Thailand. Let me go back to Thailand and apply for a scholarship.’ I was applying for that, volunteering at a Buddhist centre in Bangkok for about six months.

“And then I got an internship in Geneva, the IOM, the International Organization for Migration. So I moved to Geneva. I started working on a lot of African projects. Moved to Dakar, where I started working on research projects doing capacity building, trainings basically in migration policy development for West African governments and West African civil society.

“I got a little bit frustrated with the United Nations and how it’s difficult to make a difference if you are piggybacking on what the governments are doing.

“You’re supposed to be trying to help people who make two dollars a day while you make seven thousand a month in the same place. There are a lot of ethical issues with the UN that you only understand once you work in the system.

“So I left the UN and, after living in Senegal and Brussels and Geneva, I volunteered in Israel for a few months with some African refugees, working mainly with the Sudanese and Eritreans.

“So after Israel, I was back in Paris where I was writing ‘Hell or High Water’, and then one day I get a phone call from the IOM Chief of Mission in Niger, who I used to work with in Dakar, and she’s like, ‘I see you’re available. I need a project manager to work in Agade in the South Sahara [in Niger, bordering with Mali and Algeria], to manage an integration project. Are you interested?’ I was doing nothing at the time, so I moved to Niger and was there about a year. It was a bit of a moral compromise, but the job was more humanitarian, reintegrating and training returnees from Libya, so I had less qualms with it. I thought, well, at least you’re not on paying holidays to the Caribbean for government officials.

“Came back to Paris. I was only supposed to be there in transit. I was thinking of applying for a job in Nigeria. But a friend of mine who I used to work with in Geneva, who is Mexican, came up with this idea of helping Syrian refugees migrate to Mexico to complete their higher education. So we set up an NGO and I moved to Mexico. Eventually I reconnected with my college crush and moved to Brooklyn. Now [2017] I’m working for the Open Society Foundations on drug policy reform in Africa. We support civil society in Africa for progressive legislation around drugs.

“So I’m super-grateful because I get to go back to Africa all the time now. It’s a special life, you know.”

GR: “So here’s a question. You can tell a story about Bangladesh. Were there issues of cultural appropriation for you?”

 Mame: “OK. That’s a really good question. (Laughs) The way I think about it is this. If you are writing a story about another culture, are you setting it in that culture? Are your main characters in that culture? Or are they just serving a larger purpose that might be the culture you come from?

“When I was doing that story on female genital mutilation, I’d set it in Mali. I’d only spent a little time in Mali. I wanted to be sure that I researched what was going on in Mali, what the dynamics were.

“There’s this guy who writes a lot about Kenya, Mike Resnick. I started reading one of his stories. It was about the Kikuyu. I think it was either about child marriage or genital mutilation. But [in the world of the story] there were these European overlords who were supervising space travel. By the end of the story it was clear that the Kikuyu could have probably figured out the solution to the issue themselves, but the story was through the lens of these Europeans who decided, ‘OK this is how we are going to address this issue.’

“I think it was Wole Talabi who posted in on the African Science Fiction and Fantasy Reading Group and asked people OK, what do you think this is?

“It’s not appropriation through bad intention. It’s appropriation because you’re not giving the local people the agency to do something for themselves.

“When I am looking at issues that are really sensitive I try to take them with as much respect or distance as I have to, because I can’t necessarily relate to them. You wrote a lot about Cambodia so maybe you hit that snag too. Who am I writing about? Who am I to write about them?”

GR: “I reckon a good writer gets it right and a bad writer doesn’t. The bad writing stands horrendously exposed.”

Mame: “I try to start from a very human approach. I think despite the gender differences, the cultural differences, there’s a humanity that ties us together. There are emotions that we all share.

“It’s not necessarily about appropriating a culture as much as understanding the people you are writing about and then placing the story in a context where you are NOT saying, ‘I am the figure with the knowledge about them.’ I am just writing about the human being I know.”

At this point we have the Trump conversation and go on to his experiences in the USA.

Mame: “Geoff, I’ve been searched and frisked by the police ever since I was twelve years old for no good reason. I’ve had my head slammed against the trunk of a police car, and then they called six other officers and a helicopter.

Because they thought I fit the description of a guy who was five foot six [Mame Bougouma towers over six feet]. I’m sure I’m the spitting image of the guy but I’m not five foot six.

“I’ve been held at gunpoint by the police because I had a bulge in my pocket and they thought it was a weapon. I actually thought, ‘If I move I will be plastered all over that wall in so many pieces they will never be able to bury me.’

“It’s not a right for me to have a gun. Clearly not. It’s a right for somebody else to find me threatening and act upon it. And I don’t want to say this in any kind of judgemental way? But I am always shocked by how shocked white people are by racism.

“A co-worker wrote on Twitter once, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe how people in Poland are marching in the streets for nationalism.’ And I am like, ‘Who the hell are you?’ Maybe it’s because it’s something I’ve experienced so many times it’s like, ‘Yeah so what else is new?’ But I find there’s a naivety in white people about the hatred that is out there.

“A lot of my white friends in France are like, ‘I want to go to Africa but I’m not sure if I should go because of all the things that we’ve done,’ and I’m like, ‘Get a f******* plane ticket already and just go!’ I like that they are aware of the history, but don’t try to be so woke about it, it cripples your ability to be a person and meet other people without some post-colonial guilt weighing you down.

We pause to eat, and the tape resumes. We talk about his travel experiences.

Mame: “I work with a non-profit now. I’m super happy about that because it’s not about me any more. The UN was about sending me to manage a project. ‘This dude was born in the USA, grew up in Paris in France, has a Senegalese background.’

“I get a job in Niger. Yeah I can do it pretty well. But tell me that somebody from Niger can’t do it twice as good. I don’t believe that anybody is beneath me in any kind of way.

“Now I’m working funding NGOs to do their local work. That’s the beauty of it. They submit their proposal, I fund it, and then it’s up to them. We try to help them improve their capacity, and in the end we move out. That’s how it should always be. Local people are the experts in their own lives; let them do what needs to be done, on their own terms.

“People tell you that travel will open your mind. Travel has actually made me super-cynical about everything. Actually Terry Pratchett has made me super-cynical about everything, but so has travel. (Chuckles) At first it was, ‘Wow this is great look at all these people; look at how they’re dressed; look at what they’re eating and the different expressions in culture in dance and art and yada yada yada.’

“And then you start learning the languages, and everybody is having the exact same conversation about everything no matter where you are. In every single country. I’m expecting to meet the same great person and the same a**h***. (Chuckles) Everywhere I go.

“I’m trying to remember what my father said. Chris Hedges wrote a book on the topic. We live in an age of spectacle—reality TV. We’re feeding off a lot of fears about who we are, a lot of aspirations that are not necessarily our own but are projected onto us.

“I’ve been to Nigeria, what, maybe five times? I love that country. I got to appreciate Nigerians in their diversity as opposed to that cliché of what a Nigerian is.

“In Timor they pulled me out of the line in the airport and they’re like, ‘So you’re Nigerian’, and I’m like, “No, I’m not. Here’s my UN badge.’ ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Sir.’ Even my father when he’s travelling for his NGO work, he’s like, ‘People are always giving me s*** about Nigeria. What the f*** is going on?’

“You have half the population [of the USA] on a third on the landmass. You’re going to have exacerbation. You’re going to have more gangsters, more singers, more dancers, more writers. You’re going to have more of everything in Nigeria. Nigeria has an entrepreneurial culture that speaks volumes on how dynamic the youth is. People focus on the negative when they should be like, ‘Wow, this is the potential.’ I wish I spent time in Lagos, because any time I’ve spent in Nigeria has been in Abuja.”

GR: “It’s very slightly dull.”

Mame: “It’s a city that only exists because oil money allowed for it. The ministry that deals with oil is so futuristic it looks like a spaceship about to take off. There are no universities inside the city. The universities are all 30 kilometres outside the city. Everything is an embassy or a ministry. There’s even a capitol building. It looks like Rhode Island at night. (Chuckles)

“People told me be careful of Nigeria. IOM had cancelled the meeting I was going to, but they didn’t let me know until I was halfway through the flight. I landed there. No one was there to pick me up. This cab driver got me somewhere to change my money. He let me use his phone to call Senegal to tell him where to take me.

“I was told not to trust people in Kenya. Same thing happened, nobody told me where I was supposed to stay. I talked to girls who worked at an Internet café at Jomo Kenyatta Airport. They got me a cab; they got me a hotel that night. They said, ‘Look, you are in a sh**** situation. If you can do anything for us when you get back to Dakar, please do, but we don’t want anything from you.’ Everywhere people have told me, ‘be careful’, I have met nothing but angels.

Dakar is a safer city than Paris. Dakar is a safer city than New York. But then what city is not safer than New York? I might be worried about African police every once in a while. But I am not worried about being shot when I am in Africa.”

(Next)

Ivor Hartmann

Archaeologist Trom Thunbuld lightly tapped the pause button on the viewscreen, freezing playback of the audio file. He sat back, feeling wearily shocked, and looked out the window to the dark rocky beach far below. It was lit only by white thrashing surf as waves crashed into the shore in an endless barrage. High tide tonight, he thought, looking at the relentless waves. The moon dropped from behind a cloud bank as if on cue, its bright green blue hue shining across the sea. The panorama that usually calmed him had no such effect today; what he had just heard ricocheted around his mind:

My name is Hamadziripi, the last human. As I speak, the Delphini are coming. They have my trail, and it won’t be long now. Perhaps, while postponing the inevitable, I should broadcast this record of the final days of humankind.

Whoever hears this, I congratulate you. You have succeeded in life where we failed. Perhaps you understand that the whole survives because of each part. Life has long-term plans. Too late did we learn the lessons that lay all around and within us. Too late did we realise how complex and fragile the conditions were that enabled our existence ...

Trom thought about the receivers, roughly just over 473¹⁷ light years away, each one a nearly nebula-wide net of fine nano-wires suspended in open space, like some unimaginably huge fishnet that trawled for planet-sized fish. Except each of the five thousand nets was cast in just the right place, to painstakingly collect very old, very faint, very specific radio waves. The receivers took fifty years of meticulous construction and another thirty-two gruelling years of impatient silence. Finally, they arrived, and were superbly netted, the first radio wave transmissions with enough energy to break through the Earth’s atmosphere. And in the vacuum of space, forever to travel at the speed of light, away from planet Earth.

How they had celebrated as the data began to flow. What started as a trickle in over just a decade turned into an exponential flood. For two hundred years, Trom and his team had sifted, strained, and pieced the data into individual streams. It had been his life’s work, and now it seemed he had just heard the beginning of the end. Trom sighed and, still looking out the window, tapped the viewscreen to continue.

“Before our somewhat brisk downfall, we were foolish and arrogant. We squandered our resources and raped our lands, oceans, and ourselves. We were born whore children, enslaved by an economic system that was controlled by a sociopathic one percent of our global population. By the time the first consequences of our human actions emerged, the fine green line of ecological balance was already well frayed and past any possible human repair—”

Here, the smooth toneless voice of Trom’s automata interjected. “Data flow break in stream approximately 10, 25, 08, 0951. Next section main stream cued.”

The moon and the ocean conspired to cast him and his dark office into green, aged sculptures of oxidised copper. Trom pushed his chair back whilst eyeing the next jagged line of audio, cued on the viewscreen. He turned his chair to face the window, and gazed out.

He could see, below the swirling clouds that peppered the moon’s atmosphere, broad swathes of green and blue, cut only by high, snow-covered mountain ranges. Trom had been to those massive lush green fields and tall forests. He had dug his hands deep into its rich black soils. He had swum just off the shores of its deep and immense fresh-water lakes. The moon slowly turned as he watched, revealing a steadily moving topographical face. Trom recognised the jagged slash, white and round, piercing above the dark green. The high rim-range of Artobus, created in a pre-ancient meteor strike, was just coming into view.

From its conception to those first bizarre and exciting radio broadcast streams, this project had been his sole focus for over four hundred years now. Trom was bone-tired, and felt poisoned by all he knew about humans and their strange, short existence. It seemed as if they had evolved only to release trapped hydrocarbon energy from beneath the ground! For once this was achieved their age had quickly drawn to a close. He was overcome by a deep, melancholic sadness and empathy for these humans. They had come so close, and yet had remained so far, an evolutionary dead end.

From “Last Wave,” published in Jalada, Africa

When the histories of African SFF are written, Ivor Hartmann will be remembered as a crucial figure. Yes, African oral traditions and writing had always speculated and imagined spiritual worlds. But the work was called magic realism or folklore. The 2008 double issue of Chimurenga was devoted to black technologies; Nnedi Okorafor won the Wole Soyinka Prize in 2008; and the movie Pumzi came out in 2009.

But it was the 2012 publication of AfroSF, edited by Ivor Hartmann, that showed beyond any doubt that Africans were indeed writing what could only be called science fiction, in large numbers.

Ivor, a writer himself, had cut his teeth editing the StoryTime website and the African Roar anthologies. He’s in Sweden now, a long way from either Zimbabwe or the UK, so this interview was conducted by text in November 2018.

GR: So tell me a bit about how you ended up in Jalada’s anthology Afrofuture(s) with “Last Wave.”

Ivor: I saw the sub call, entered a story I had written some time ago but never found the right home for.

GR: That would have been about 2015? It's amazing how far we've come since then.

Ivor: Just looking for the emails ... yeah, sub-edited in 2014.

GR: Wow. Did you know Moses (Kilolo) or any of the team before that?

Ivor: Yes, I had been following Jalada since they started; they had been doing impressive things.

GR: Darn right.

Ivor: Only got to know them personally with that anthology. In as much as one does when being edited.

GR: Do you recall the inspiration for the story?

Ivor: Simple premise: who would be the last person on Earth and what could possibly come after humans?

GR: How come you don’t write more?

Ivor: It's a battle between publishing and writing. On one hand I want to write more; on the other I feel a strong need to address holes in African writing. Got started in publishing because when I started writing again there were so few local publishing venues for African SFFH. Exactly one to be precise, Something Wicked.

GR: Something Wicked was in South Africa, right?

Ivor: Yes, it was a funded endeavour while it lasted. By the SA government.

GR: Who was doing it? Nerine Dorman or someone like her?

Ivor: Joe Vaz and Vianne Venter. The funding dried up; then they did two anthologies and stopped. But they were trying to be an international SFFH mag whilst encouraging local writers.

GR: Shame. This would have been before you started African Roar?

Ivor: I started the StoryTime magazine first; Something Wicked was still running then. I published a weekly story for five years. That's how the African Roar anthologies came about. They were selected from the magazine, a Best-of. The first African Roar anthology was 2010.

GR: I remember I reprinted a story from African Roar by Nnedi Okorafor.

Ivor: Yep, I published from as many writers as possible, including myself to begin with and occasionally once the ball was rolling. The stories are all still there online. Jungle Jim started up in 2011. She (Jenna Bass, the co-founder of Jungle Jim) scraped me for writers' emails when she started.

GR: And you did all this for love?

Ivor: Yep, pretty much, addressing a need. Learning how to edit, etc. The stories were online for free. No ads, no charge. It was all about using the new tech available to us, opening up the publishing landscape. Getting away from the gatekeepers. Doing our own thing.

GR: It's kind of similar to The Naked Convos (the Nigerian blog partly edited by Wole Talabi). Younger writers getting out from under all the barriers to storytelling and being read.

Ivor: Yep, exactly, StoryTime, the mag and anthologies, broke ground for many other writers and publishers-to-be, just showed it was possible on a zero budget, well apart from ISP charges, and time, so much time.

GR: StoryTime wasn't SFF per se though, right? A lot of people wrote crime for it too?

Ivor: I was open to everything; as long as I could work with the writer and edit into something comprehensible I published it. We are still fighting the colonisation aspects, being told what to write, being told what a great novel is, the literature vs. genre bollocks.

GR: OK. That is VERY true in South Africa. Or was.

Ivor: Also Zimbabwe, Nigeria, etc. ... it’s a mind legacy. SA got very big into crime genre, still is, that did open up things somewhat.

GR: I'm not sure about Nigeria. Ake ALWAYS has a panel on SFF, and Ouida Books and others are publishing all kinds of stuff.

Ivor: Ake is quite new, all that is quite new; it wasn’t around at all when I started in 2007.

GR: Okay. So scroll back. Little Ivor is growing up in Zim. What's he reading? How is he getting hold of SFF?

Ivor: Library junkie from age six, read my way through every library I could access. Public and private libraries.

GR: Private libraries ... you mean family and friends? School? Subscriptions?

Ivor: Yep, family and friends and even schools I didn’t attend. Yeah heh, I was voracious.

GR: Favourite books were?

Ivor: Hard question, too many to name, in terms of SFF—got hooked on Frank Herbert pretty young, he was doing things no one else was. Did Tolkien when I was 13, but started on Frank before that. Very few comics, just stuff from SA, so I only got into Graphic Novels much later on. I did of course Tintin, Asterix, etc., stuff that was in libraries. I wasn't too fussy, knew what I liked but also just read everything anyway. I was at boarding school when I started Tolkien, so it was a very good way to escape.

I started boarding school when I was in primary school, well off and on, I was very wild, my mother didn't know what to do with me.

We moved around a lot in Zim when I was young. My Dad left when I was five. I went to eight or nine different primary schools and two secondary schools. Zim after independence, those first ten to fifteen years, was amazing, we were all free, semi-socialist, and seriously optimistic.

GR: Jeez what happened?

Ivor: Well, it was all bollocks behind the scenes, we just didn't know about it. So as teens we had this most amazing period of time that is hard to explain to other people who weren't there or that age.

GR: Sounds a bit like '94 in SA—full of hope.

Ivor: Yes, very much so, but in a particularly Zimbabwean way, a sense of unity that SA never came close to, and I know—I've been in both places. There are many Shona tribes, but they have a greater sense of unity. It's part of the culture.

Hunhu is what it is called, not quite the same as Ubuntu but similar, more ingrained in societal fabric. Yes, one could say that Apartheid was far worse than British colonialism, but also pretty awful, the biggest mistake the British made was handing over to Smith.

That's when things got really bad, that's when what is essentially a pacifistic society just couldn't be one any more, and of course the Chinese and Russians were keen to help.

My Dad was a white supremacist: fully indoctrinated, fought the Rhodesian war; lost, fled to SA. My mum however was opposed to Smith, very feminist, marched with Bertrand Russell, was part of Black Sash, I don't even know how she got together with my Dad, but he was a charmer.

GR: So your Mom kind of raised you?

Ivor: Yep, though she became a working mum from when I was five, then career-driven, so I was pretty much left to my own from then, raised by our domestic workers and brother and sister. I had books too; they saved me from going completely feral.

GR: I was a goody two-shoes. Feral could be fun.

Ivor: Well, yeah, until you have to interact in society. I have known adults who were feral kids. They suffer. No boundaries, no sense of conduct. I was a good kid until my Dad split, I didn't take it well.

I lived in Zim until 1999 mostly, then Cape Town, then Johannesburg until 2014, then Sweden. I never wanted to leave Zim, and when I was forced to I went as close as I could, SA, until I met my wife who lived in Sweden. So, yeah, had never left Africa until then.

GR: Excuse me, FORCED to leave Zim?

Ivor: By circumstance, economic exile I guess you could call it. It wasn't political or anything. I have a South African passport. It’s a long story; basically it was easier for me to have an SA passport to travel between the two countries.

GR: This last trip to Naija, for the first time, I had a real sense that ALL the young writers just wanted to get out of Nigeria. They don’t love the West, but its money, education, and electricity.

Ivor: Yeah, it’s all very alluring, but when you sit down and think about it, or even go and experience it, you realise that there's a price to be paid for it, a big one. In freedom, in lost relations, relationships, etc., in systemic racism, etc. I'm stuck in Sweden until my stepson finishes school, but my plan has always been to return home.

The more developed a country the more controlling it is, even if it might not seem like it. The possibilities are gradually limited. In Sweden so much is done in the name of public safety it’s scary, how docile people become and so very entitled.

GR: OK. Gear shift. So how did you go from African Roar to AfroSF? Was there a eureka moment?

Ivor: I wanted to do AfroSF from the very beginning in 2007, but I just didn't have the skills to do it properly. So I set about learning them through the magazine and then publishing the African Roar anthologies (co-edited with Emmanuel Sigauke), and did that until by 2011 I felt confident enough and sent out the subs call.

GR: Wow. It was all a long-term Machiavellian scheme.

Ivor: Heh, yes, I do like my obsessions, it was a calling.

GR: And you had a full address book to write to.

Ivor: Exactly, I had built up a lot of writer relationships by then.

GR: Were almost all the writers people you had previously published?

Ivor: Quite a few but not all, once the call went out it spread far and wide. Also don't forget quite a few of the writers in the first AfroSF had never been published. Tendai Huchu's first SF story was in the first volume. Cristy Zinn’s was her first work published. Chinelo's first SF story was published there and Biram's (Mboob) first SF. I think it was Mandisi (Nkomo’s) first work. Also Liam Kruger’s first work. I think it was Mia Arderne’s first work and Rafeeat Aliyu’s first work.

GR: So you were making a place at the table for many people. One thing I wanted to ask: was Volume 1 both an ebook and a printed volume? Why not just an ebook when print distribution is so much work?

Ivor: AfroSF was both ebook and paperback, but the ebook came first, which through sales paid for the paperback. I work on a zero-capital, time-only business plan.

GR: The paper version was mainly for the West? Books are hard to move around African roads.

Ivor: Umm, no, I wanted it to be for everyone. Yes, it’s a problem still, though smart phones have had a big impact. My best moment is to see a second/third/fourth-hand print copy of AfroSF for sale on the streets.

GR: Yup, that's the real African book trade. It's interesting that I still retain a clear memory of so many of the stories. Tendai's castrated guy trying to stop the Chinese shipping out the Great Zimbabwe; Tade's (Thompson) street gangs in the bomb creator. Mazi Nwonwu’s story about aliens and masquerade. Did it feel a bit like you had detonated a bomb and nobody would ever be able to say again that Africans didn't write SF?

Ivor: Yes, exactly That was one of the points in making a Pan-African anthology. It was key to me that AfroSF be Pan-African, that it not be tied to any one country.

GR: Then came AfroSFv2 in 2016. It was a collection of novellas and three out of the five nominees for the first Nommo Award for best novella were published in v2. Volume 3 is just out and that's got to be a major focus of the interview. I have to get to the supermarket or no food this weekend. Could we reconvene to talk about the anthologies in more detail?

Ivor: Shall we say tomorrow, same time, 13:00?

(We started up the next day.)

GR: So, tell me the story again of AfroSF. Chinelo and Mazi said that you got all the writers of AfroSF together on email, so that it was easy for them to write to them with the call for subs for the first Omenana.

Ivor: Yes, at the end of putting together every anthology, I introduce all the writers to each other by making their emails visible. This has a lot of good effects.

We're not a huge community; its good to know everyone you're in an antho with so you can further network and such.

So AfroSFv1 was not just from my pool of writers. It was an open submission. It all depends on if they make it to the final. From the beginning when I started editing, if I liked a concept the writer was going for I would do my best to edit it with them no matter how badly it was written to begin with. So more often than not we ended up with something publishable, though not always, sometimes no matter how much we tried to edit it the writer just didn't have the skills, I was persistent though. Some edits in the StoryTime mag took over two years to come right. Sometimes however the writer just had too much ego to be edited.

Mame Bougouma Diene saw the call and came in new with “Hell Freezes Over.” Yeah, “Hell Freezes Over” in AfroSFv2, a lot of work, novellas are so much work and doing five of them in one go was quite something.

GR: Maybe tell the story of one or two interesting cases. Bring them to life getting a great idea from a writer new to you.

Ivor: Mia Arderne in AfroSFv1 was interesting, first time published, very sexual, quite a different outlook. It's rare to find very sexual works well-written, not just lewd and porny. Cristy Zinn was also interesting, first time published, quite a unique voice. She has gone on to good things.

GR: Cristy I see is in Volume 3 as well

Ivor: Yes. That's right.

GR: So who else was an exciting moment for you in Volume 1?

Ivor: Tendai was great, it was awesome to have a well-established writer doing SF for the first time and nailing it. We've been good friends since the first antho. I met him for the first time at Africa Writes. That's how it goes these days, since the beginning, so many writers I've never actually met but am good friends with.

GR: My memory is that the Nommo Awards grew out of that panel at Africa Writes. Tom Ilube heard the panel and said from the audience that he’d finance an award. But you clever clogs got his email address and got hold of him once the African SFF Reading Group people had hammered out how the Nommos would work.

Ivor: it was Ikhide Ikheloa who put Tom and I together. They met at the Ake Festival in 2013, it was then Tom told Ikhide he was interested in funding an African SF award.

And because of AfroSFv1 Ikhide recommended talking to me.

GR: So were you in Sweden by then?

Ivor: So that's when I started talking to Tade and such, but it was only with ASFS that I thought here now is something Tom can get behind, because it wasn't going to be just me doing it all, which I wasn't able to do.

GR: No, it's me doing it all

Ivor: Well, yes, but you set that up Geoff, eh. People won't do anything if they think someone else will do it for them.

GR: Your introduction in AfroSFv1 summed up my hopes for Afrofuturism at the time. That quote about having to imagine your own future so that someone else doesn't do it for you? Were you aware at the time that the anthology might be a game changer?

Ivor: Yes, totally aware. I thought long and hard about that intro, the anthology, had been working on it since 2007 really. I knew it was past time to change the game.

I was very keen for the cover to reflect that fact the Africans had been telling SF stories while Europeans were still living in caves heheh. So I was drawn to the Dogon symbols. The Dogon have a very complex mythology that incorporates advanced mathematics, even quantum theory, and is quite linked to astronomy and the idea of alien races, and such.

GR: Who did the actual artwork for it?

Ivor: Unless I bring an artist's work in, I do all the artwork, layout, etc. One-man micro-press.

The printing was done by Lightning Source, a printer and distributor, from the African Roar anthologies onwards. Well after I tried another publisher who totally fucked up the first antho, I thought f*** this, let me do it myself. So it was POD all the way. Distributions through Amazon, B&N, etc.

GR: Enormous satisfaction when it came out?

Ivor: Yes :-), but it was also very nerve-wracking. There was a fair bit of negativity to deal with as well. I just couldn't believe how very little progress there had been in African SFF, as a writer trying to publish my own works locally.

GR: What do you think AfroSF changed?

Ivor: I think it blew things wide open, showed that we were interested in thinking and writing about our own possible futures, that no longer were we going to just accept a future imposed upon us. It also took African SFF out of the very little, mainly white corner it was in.

GR: You said negativity. I don’t remember negativity around v1. Bad reviews or what?

Ivor: Yeah, people saying it wasn't SF, that it was horribly edited, etc., because it challenged their notions, and I refused to whitewash the language and styles used into some western standard. I don’t italicise African-language words, I don’t change the author’s voice, we have our own African English unique to each writer and where they come from.

GR: Chinelo Onwualu talks about people from privileged countries wanting Africans to write polished western prose, without any sense of context.

Ivor: Yep, that's right.

But from the international SF community it was amazing, a lot of love and acceptance and excitement. I was really appreciative of that.

GR: AfroSFv2 was all novellas. How come?

Ivor: I felt that we needed to work on larger works, short stories are great, we as African writers love doing them, it's our forte really, but no one was doing novellas, and very few doing novels. I thought it could be a good step in encouraging things in that direction.

GR: Gotcha. It's a good length for SFF because you can do world building.

Ivor: That's right; one can really explore something in much greater detail. I may have gone overboard with Efe's (Tokunbo Okogu) story (An Indigo Song for Paradise), but I really wanted to give him free rein, and I liked what he was doing. It was one of those stories that just kept getting bigger and bigger with every edit, but it wasn't in a bad way, I really liked what he was doing, so it ended up being huge and very different. He was also going through a lot at the time, self-revelations, and such, and it really came through in his writing.

GR: It sounds like you thought it was one of the standouts.

Ivor: I never have favourites

GR: The second volume didn’t have a contribution from a woman.

Ivor: That’s right, it wasn’t what I wanted, but that’s how the final version ended up being, and it became a very big thing that almost crashed the whole antho.

GR: I don’t think you handled the fallout from that well.

Ivor: I must get better at PR, but really also, if one just actually looks at my work what I have done, then it is pretty obvious I'm all about encouraging anyone and everyone as much as possible, I want there to be equality, I want women writers, and gay, and trans, and well everyone who gets side-lined because of who they are, when really it’s all about the work they do, that is what counts, the story comes first above and beyond everything else. I am not a democratic editor or publisher, I publish stories I think are good no matter who writes them, and I will never publish someone to just fulfil some kind of quota or tokenism.

GR: The ToC for Volume 3 is out and it has stories by Cristy Zinn and Gabriella Muwunga.

Ivor: Yes, they submitted great stories. I am more than happy to publish them. They clocked the theme, as did all the stories and this is what we have:

Space, the astronomical wilderness that has enthralled our minds since we first looked up in wonder. We are ineffably drawn to it, and equally terrified by it. We have created endless mythologies, sciences, and even religions, in the quest to understand it. We know more now than ever before and are taking our first real steps. What will become of Africans out there, will we thrive, how will space change us, how will we change it? AfroSFv3 is going out there, into the great expanse, and with twelve visions of the future we invite you to sit back, strap in, and enjoy the ride.

I still have lots to do before publication day, and then back into my writing, and I'm working on a project that if it works out is going to significantly change the game again for African SF, but can't talk about what it is at all.

GR: Whoa!

Ivor: Yeah if it works out it will be a big Whoa :-).

GR: You can't just say that. A bit more of a clue? A movie? TV show? Reality TV? Workshop?

Ivor: But I learnt my lesson the hard way and long ago about talking about things before they are concrete.

GR: Your own writing?

Ivor: At this precise moment, absolutely nothing, got to finish what I’m on. My last story was in Brittle Paper, but I am all set for a big push in that direction next year. It will be like starting all over again really, and that's OK. It’s difficult. I'm no good at balancing things, I work better when I can be singularly obsessive. So, one obsession at a time.

GR: Any thoughts on being an African abroad?

Ivor: I think it may be a bit different for me; I only left Africa for love. It’s the only thing that could get me to leave, and I am going back as soon as it’s possible. But, the effect is the same, even though the work I do does let me live anywhere I want really as long as I have a computer and net connection.

My wife is why I live in Sweden. She’s very much a part of all these anthos, she reads and proofs them for me, gives me advice. We actually got together, or closer, because of my work, she was a fan and became my first reader for my works. So it was because of the StoryTime mag we started talking, became friends. Luckily for me, my wife is far more intelligent than me, and being challenged intellectually is one of my prime needs.

I miss my people, the people I grew up with, the way of being we had, we are scattered all over the world now. I think people who grow up and live in the same town or even country don't know how lucky they are, to have your family and friends close throughout your life, that is a gift beyond measure. I miss sadza, can't get proper mealie meal here (but I am growing some next summer), we have friends and family that bring it whenever they come. I miss the culture I grew up in, Shona culture; it’s something quite special.

I talked about Hunhu earlier. This is very much part of it. Something that makes sure you greet every person you walk past with genuine interest, not just out of politeness, though that is part of it. I'm not idealising or romanticising it out of a sense of nostalgia. Every society has its problems too, but I very much love the society I grew up in, it has such a great depth to it. It is a part of who I am.

(Next)

There has been a lot of disagreement and even angst lately over the terms used to describe African speculative fiction.

Myself I am not entirely happy with the term Afrofuturism because so much of the work isn’t futurist.

Often African writing relates to the past, the pre-colonial past, or rather perhaps a past that never goes away, that co-exists with contemporary Africa.

In the last chapter, the author and working sangoma Unathi Magubeni said:

Our concepts of time are different. The Western model of time tends to project into the future, far into the future.

Our time, the moment you are born the deeper you go into time, you go backwards. As you get older, you don’t go forward with time, you are going backward. You become an elder of the tribe, a grandfather. You are not looking there, (gestures to one place) sharing the future, there as in forwards. You are there. (Gestures to a different there). That person passes on. We remember them by libations. ‘I am drinking this water in honour of this person.’ Or we do certain rituals in honour of this person. And they go further into the land of myths. (Laughs). Back, back, back.

It seems to be that if this is new science fiction, we are looking at time differently. You’re not going to find Africans projecting themselves forward when they write their science fiction.”

Stacy Hardy in her 2018 interview in this chapter also sees many continental cultures having a different relationship to time, and expresses discomfort with the term science fiction:

This linear march ... it’s why I get a bit of a stutter when the word science fiction is thrown out.

It seems to me to be very much based on the idea that now we must progress and that how we progress is technologically. And I just don’t believe that the continent works that way. We talk about a future as if it is something we need to march towards.

So much African speculative reaches back into tradition. In her interview, Chikodili Emelumadu talks about how disillusion with Britain when she finally came here, turned her attention back to her Igbo culture.

My dreams of England had no foundation and basis—I couldn't reconcile them with what I was seeing. Since I couldn't be English in that way, I had to dig around in my own psyche. I started looking back at history, my own history. Both of my grandmothers were alive and taking steps towards them made me aware how much I was like a little grain of sand in the hourglass of time. I'd taken my grandparents, language, culture all for granted. I had to figure out what I wanted to be in myself."

Derek Lubangakene in his interview says.

Distinctively African is that we are retelling the stories we were told. That’s number one. The myths we were told as kids. You can’t write in a mainstream way, but those myths are being lost if we don’t write about them. First and foremost, it might be science fiction, but what you are writing is African folklore at least to a degree, something you are told round a bonfire, or by your parents or someone talking about village life.

It’s like a repository, to keep it. Our cultures are being destroyed. How do you get that back if you don’t write about it?”

Much of Dilman Dila’s interview talks about Ugandan folk tales and history.

I want to bring mythologies that I heard as a child, and things that have been happening in our communities into the mainstream.

Wole Talabi curates a database of published speculative fiction by Africans on the ASFS website. For 2017 roughly 100 works by Africans are listed—and only about a third of them are described as science fiction. The rest are other kinds of tales, many of them drawing on or relating to traditional beliefs.

Wole Talabi is definitely is a science fiction writer. His Nommo-award nominated, Caine-Reader-Award winning short story ‘The Regression Equation’ is about testing AI in the future. The next chapter in this series will publish an interview with him. I express the view that not much science fiction is being written in African. Wole says:

I agree. But you can’t tell people what to write. I do personally wish there was more genuine speculation about the future, constructing a new one. Yeah sure you can write about Mami Wata and the Ogb Anti. And you can construct interesting stories. But what comes after?

Nnedi Okorafor is another futurist. Who Fears Death and the Binti series of novellas are set in futures pungently flavoured with African cultures.

In an important post Nnedi Okorafor asked that from now on she be referred to as an ‘africanfuturist’. She also said she didn’t want to explain why she makes the request ... people should just respect it.

All I can respectfully say is that I think I understand why the distinction is important to her.

The term Afrofuturism was coined by Marc Derry in "Black to the Future," an interview with Samuel Delany, musician Greg Tate, and cultural critic Tricia Rose, that appeared appearing in Dery’s collection of essays Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (1994).

At its inception, the term Afrofuturism was by definition about the diaspora experience. This perception of the term continues.

Mazi Nwonwu, the co-founder of Omenana in a thread on the African Science Fiction and Fantasy Reading Group page on Facebook wrote:

My take is that Afrofuturism is an American movement that ties into the American experience and reality.

I don't think there is any political or cultural force behind us writing sci-fi in Africa. We write.

In his interview, Ntone Edjabe said:

... At that moment, Kojo Laing, the Ghanaian author, published Major Gentil and the Achimoto Wars. This is 1991-1992, the same year that there’s that famous interview where the term Afrofuturism appears in print.

... All of this talks of SF as from the diaspora, the poetics of schizophrenia, all these alienated bodies ... which is fine, but how the fuck is it that they miss Kojo Laing? I mean you don’t get more SF than that shit.

In The Johannesburg Review of Books, Mohale Moshigo on the publication of her new volume of short stories, wrote a piece ‘Afrofuturism is not for Africans Living in Africa’.

I believe Africans, living in Africa, need something entirely different from Afrofuturism. I’m not going to coin a phrase but please feel free to do so. Our needs, when it comes to imagining futures, or even reimagining a fantasy present, are different from elsewhere on the globe; we actually live on this continent, as opposed to using it as a costume or a stage to play out our ideas. We need a project that predicts (it is fiction after all) Africa’s future ‘postcolonialism’; this will be divergent for each country on the continent because colonialism (and apartheid) affected us in unique (but sometimes similar) ways. In South Africa, for instance, there needs to exist a place in our imaginations that is the opposite of our present reality where a small minority owns most of the land and lives better lives than the rest.

And she doesn’t want to ‘parrot’ Afrofuturism:

Afrofuturism is an escape for those who find themselves in the minority and divorced or violently removed from their African roots, so they imagine a ‘black future’ where they aren’t a minority and are able to marry their culture with technology. That is a very important story and it means a lot to many people. There are so many wonderful writers from the diaspora dealing with those feelings or complexities that it would be insincere of me to parrot what they are doing.

She may not want to come up with a label but ends by saying ‘Let us be fantastical,” which she footnotes:

* fantastical (adj.): conceived or appearing as if conceived by an unrestrained imagination; odd and remarkable; bizarre; grotesque.

The term Afrofuturism has already been expanded to include Africans in Africa.

Reynaldo Anderson edited with Charles Jones a volume of essays, Afrofuturism 2.0, published in 2016. In his introduction, he proposed a different concept: Astro-Blackness:

Astro-Blackness is an Afrofuturistic concept in which a person's black state of consciousness, released from the confining and crippling slave or colonial mentality, becomes aware of the multitude and varied possibilities and probabilities within the universe. (Rollins, 2015, 1)

More precisely Astro-Blackness represents the emergence of a black identity framework within emerging global technocultural assemblages, migration, human reproduction, algorithms, digital networks software platforms, bio-technical augmentation and are constitutive of racialized identities that are increasingly materialized vis-à-vis contemporary technological advances or "technogenesis, the idea that humans and technics have co-evolved together" (Hayes, 2012).

The internet has made blackness a worldwide identity—one that most certainly includes Africa and Africans. Afrofuturism 2.0 sees the diaspora as being one arm of Pan-Africanism.

Reynaldo Anderson also co-founded with John Jennings the Black Speculative Arts Movement and is currently heading a series of seminars in Africa using the term Afrofuturism 3.0. Watch this space. Here is his interview with Design Indaba.

Yann-Cedric Agbodan-Aolio is the francophone author of four published science fiction novels. For him, “Afrofuturism is not a subgenre of science fiction but an artistic current that covers all genres of the imaginary.”

For him there are more than one afrofuturisms. In a text that grew out of a talk he gave recently at Eurocon in Amiens in 2018 and republished on the ASFS website, he describes Afrofuturism as:

A more or less profound reflection on the problems encountered by African populations and Afrodescendants in the course of history, in society (colonialism, slavery, apartheid, corruption, poverty, Mass migration, Children soldiers, access to drinking water...)

A share of feminism by the exultation of women and its place in society

A exultation of the past of Africa of the Great empires and kingdoms and thus a more or less faithful transposition of the ancient feudal structures.

The richness of spiritualties and myths

A certain positivism that pushes forward civilization.

Some people find attempts at re-labelling irrelevant. Nikhil Singh, author of Taty Went West in a recent post on the African SFF Reading Group on Facebook:

Afrofuturism has a nice roll to it. africanfuturism just sounds like another silly academic wankoff ... then breaks the catchiness irreparably.

And later

I think this whole conversation is absurd. Terminology is handy for filing systems, but attempting to order creative output, past, present and future, according to Terminology smacks of content control. Afrofuturism is a loose and accepted term, and like it or not, words survive according to their inherent charm. These sorts of academic attempts to restrict output according to acceptable protocols need to be opposed.

Terminology matters to me. If you define a term as being about one set of people, it may by that definition exclude others.

Marketing terms matter. They set expectations.

Set the wrong expectation and you can ruin the work—for the reader, yes, but also for the author. This is an quote from a review of one of my books: It looks like it is going to be a slice of hard Science Fiction, but it soon becomes obvious that it is more a melodrama set around the petty politics of a remote village in a far flung country. This was not what I signed up for.

To write with impact, authors need a sense of what readers will make of their work – how they read, what many of them will enjoy, what their expectations are. You can’t please everybody. But it helps if your book does what it says on the label.

So some writers feel they have to own the label, and if they can’t, the label has to change.

Lest the label owns them.

(Next)

Stacy Hardy

When she first discovers the thing, she reacts with fright. It isn’t just its outlandish appearance but also its proximity. Why, considering all the suitable nooks and crannies, the possible hidey holes in the vicinity, has it chosen her? In truth she might not have noticed it if it wasn’t for the itch. At first, barely noticeable, more like a humming, a low-level vibration somewhere in her nether regions, then louder, more insistent.

Eventually she has no choice but to give herself over, to make her way to the bathroom, shut the door and strip down. She sits on the toilet—lid down—kicks off shoes and peels leggings, thrusts hips forward and bends head. Even from this position, bum balanced, legs akimbo, she has trouble discerning anything. It isn’t so much that the thing is well hidden, as it is that its very form resists easy definition. Much about it is familiar: its colour—pinkish, brownish—its jowls and dugs, its convex shape. All these things are easy to describe, but how they are assembled evades logic.

Her first reaction is to snap her legs shut, get dressed, and pretend she has seen nothing. She tries to calm herself. To breathe. She isn’t usually scared by strange animals or creepy-crawlies. She grew up outside the city, a semi-rural area known for its biodiversity. Her childhood was spent collecting worms and beetles, chasing after frogs and meerkats. It’s only recently that she moved to the south, a coastal metropolis. She tells herself that the thing is probably like her, some poor rural animal that has strayed from its natural environment. It is nothing to be afraid of. After all, there must be all sorts of species, and subspecies she has never encountered before. Small mammals alone come in a number of varieties. There are rodents, tree shrews, and the eulipotyphla made up of moles, hedgehogs, and solenodons; and each of those categories has its own variants and deviants, its smallest incarnation.

“Involution,” first published by Short Story Day Africa in Migrations.

When I was in South Africa, people kept telling me I should interview Stacy Hardy, who was teaching in Grahamstown at Rhodes University.

Finally I did, but two years later in 2018. By then her speculative fiction story “Involution” had been nominated for a Caine Prize. So I interviewed her in the Royal London Overseas Club. As a teacher, Stacy plainly has to talk well for a living. Words tumble out of her so quickly that sometimes she lets a sentence complete itself in your mind. Before it’s finished she’s jumped onto the next one. She pauses a lot, laughs a lot.

Stacy has been at the core of the South African avant-garde for more than a decade, working with Chimurenga and its offshoot The Chronic. Chimurenga helped kick off Africanfuturism with its 2006 special issue on graphic fiction and its 2008 double issue on black technology. (See the interview with Ntone Edjabe in this series for more background.)

We begin talking about her nominated story. She never once mentions her nomination for the Caine.

Stacy: “The story (“Involution”) forms part of a bigger body of work that I probably started working on about two or three years ago, at the time coming out of a preoccupation with asking questions around the body, and my own experiences of illness.

“Also increasingly I’ve been grappling with ideas of humanity, what it is to be human. It’s one of the big questions of our time that we’ve operated under a very Western idea of what the human is, which sees the human as something superior, something separate—the individual. Those strong philosophical Western ideas have led to a situation where the planet is decimated. And at the same time racism is built on something similar. Who is human, and who is not human. All the great horrors of our history, and as a white South African, all the horrors of my own personal history were perpetuated on those grounds.

“I was raised as a young girl in apartheid. I was very fortunate that by the time I hit adulthood it was over, so to speak. I say ‘so to speak’ because very little was transformed in the daily lives of people.

“It was a really important question for me to ask because I was brought up to think I was superior. I was human and other people didn’t have that humanity, which allowed for a system like apartheid to separate and divide people—and to murder. The decimation and the bloodshed and oppression and degrading were all a part of that.”

She swerves away from talking about her story to mention a favourite writer.

Stacy: “I was trying to think about these things philosophically, very inspired by Sylvia Wynter, a fabulous Caribbean theorist, novelist—and she also wrote plays. Certainly her fiction sits in speculative other worlds. Those kind of philosophical questions started creeping into my own work.

“Certainly the body of my work is about bodies (Smiles). In that specific story, a girl’s body is invaded by something—seemingly. And it is a something that she does not know. She does not know what it wants. It’s the alien Other in many ways. She can’t decide if it’s threatening or non-threatening, if it’s violent.

“There’s also an ambiguity around whether what she is encountering is in fact an alien or merely her own body which she is so alienated from. Which is another pertinent question—the way we’ve been taught to deal with our bodies.”

I say to Stacy that for me her story was definitely about a woman so alienated that part of her body is alien to her.

Stacy: “Absolutely. Interestingly when the story started out the thing was something quite external. And then I realized that the thing I was trying to write about was in fact a vagina. (Laughs). There was a strange experience for me. Are we the alien? Am I the alien? Are our bodies the alien?

“I’m obsessed with how strange and fantastical and wonderful our bodies are. (Gilles) Deleuze (in his book Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza) asks a wonderful question: ‘What can a body do?’ I’m struck that we only have a tiny fraction of an idea of what our physical bodies are capable of. They are this incredible technology. We spend a lot of time building other technology and we’re very bad at dealing with our own bodies.

“Very often we build technologies to the detriment of our own bodies. I’m a prime example of something that has now ... almost ... If I could get rid of my body I would. I’d very happily upload my mind into cyberspace. (Laughs) Long been a desire. I would very happily do that and just be a machine brain. That whole cyberpunk idea that was very big in the ‘90s has very much appealed to me.

“I’ve always delved into science fiction. As a young girl I grew up in Polokwane, which was Pietersburg under apartheid. And there was a public library but very little other access to books, and it was also an apartheid system. What got into the country, what was available to read growing up in a small town under apartheid, was enormously sheltered. I took to the library and spent hours trying to find things, and I found the science fiction collection. What did they have? I think the thing that hit me the most from what they had—I read all the Asimovs. And Fohl, what was his name—Pohl. Frederik Pohl.

“He’s absolutely brilliant. I’m a little girl from Polokwane; I know very little about the world; I’m very isolated under this apartheid system. I find Frederik Pohl and he blows my mind. I don’t understand the books and I’m very aware that I don’t understand the books so I spend hours trying to understand.

“Because I was very lonely as well and I felt I was the only person reading this kind of stuff, I used to leave notes in the books. ‘If you take this book out and read it, please phone me.’ (Laughs.) No one ever did.

“Then I arrived at university just at the end of apartheid. And the internet was just starting up. And I was lucky to have landed up at Rhodes University, which was one of the first hubs when it was the really early days of the internet. ARPANET it was called in those days. So we were doing very simple messaging, and my boyfriend at the time was a computer geek. He was putting together his own computers from when he was a kid. He loved that stuff so he was always in the labs and I would go out with him and hang around.

“I got quite into the utopian ideas of that early internet era. This was a possibility for another world. And that’s a theme, searching for another world. That’s how I would define African science fiction to a large extent and (that definition) possibly has chartered much of my journey in thinking about science fiction.

The cover of the first Chimurenga. It was NOT conceived of as a journal at the time. The title is a ChiShona word meaning “Liberation Struggle.”

“Certainly with Chimurenga, it was the possibility of another world that Chimurenga offered. I found an issue of the magazine in Clarke’s bookshop in Cape Town. The first thing that struck me about it was that I couldn’t tell when it came from. It came as a kind of time travel device. It was the first issue (Music is the Weapon!), but I couldn’t tell this thing had come from the past, if it was a very old journal, or if it was brand new or it had come from the future. I was totally and utterly intrigued.

“So I set up a ruse to interview Ntone as a way I suppose to meet these cool people. I claimed to be a journalist and went to interview him. And then I said to them that their online presence was abysmal and didn’t they want to do anything about it? And I just started working with them.

“For me, what Chimurenga provided, and it was quite an urgent time in my body—I mean in my life. I was not well. I started to become unwell in my body. Cape Town. I found myself in Cape Town and I really hated Cape Town. I was incredibly unhappy and alienated. I felt like I’d come from another planet.

“I found it a hideously racist city and an untransformed city. I found people snobbish. I landed myself in a white writing community. I went out to seek the writing community and all you could find was the white writing community, which offended me.

“I used to go to these hideous f*** book launches of people, middle-class people standing around drinking wine, and I was like, ‘This is not something I want to be involved in.’ So I was a miserable, lonely, and deeply unhappy writer. I was ill. Everything was bad. (Laughs.)

Then I found Chimurenga and my first sense of it was like, ‘There are other worlds out there that they never told you about,’ which is a line from Sun Ra.

“I’m a great person for saying that Chimurenga is Ntone, and he’ll bash me over the head for saying that, and say ‘No, it’s everyone.’ I really think it’s his vision, but it’s a vision that I’m prepared to work hard for and get behind. Because I think what he’s trying is the work of speculation, is the work of trying to dream another way of being in the world that is less violent, less exclusionary, less based on oppression than our current world is.

“That is what struck me about Chimurenga. A: that it had created its own other world so that B: it gave you a world to go to. You could leave the planet of Cape Town. It all became spatially metaphoric for me because Cape Town is already a satellite floating off the continent. If you have to think about where Cape Town is, I couldn’t tell you where it is. Cape Town is certainly not in Africa.

“South Africa is an unbelievable place. If you want the science fiction nightmare, if you want the dystopian nightmare, South Africa has it all in amplitude. And the technology of apartheid was extraordinary. The architecture and the technology that was implemented and how that technology seized bodies were incredible. The power of the technology still holds the country and so many of its people.

“You have to work very hard to get outside of your comfort zone and in that way I was really blessed to land on Planet Chimurenga. I’ve said to Ntone a few times that he saved my life. I truly believe I would not be around today if I hadn’t encountered Chimurenga. I would have lost my mind; I would have died.

“The first thing I did for Chimurenga was that I wrote a piece for the journal, a piece on Julius Eastman (the American minimalist composer, operatic singer, dancer, and gay/black rights activist).”

At that point I gasp and claim that I am a huge Julius Eastman fan.

Stacy: “We were the first people to write about him. Julius Eastman’s journey is a beautiful journey because he was forgotten in America. Then the album came out (the three-disc Unjust Malaise) and it came out to small acclaim. It was hardly noticed. I read a small review. Where does obsession come from? I read the review and it would not leave my mind. I ordered the album online and I listened to it and it blew my mind.”

(With contemporary classic pieces called “Crazy Nigger” or “Gay Guerrilla,” she wasn’t the only one.)

Eastman suffered for being talented in too many areas. Here he is taking a lead role in the opera Songs for a Mad King, composed by Peter Maxwell-Davies. He was also known in the world of dance as well as an innovative contemporary classical composer. The link above goes to Eastman playing and singing his own piece Geologic Moments. This recording is not available on any CD. The second half of the piece with his vocals also written by him is a meditation on God. People cough.

“So we wrote and that was in 2007. And that piece was when I started with Chimurenga. I told Ntone about the idea and he was like, ‘I want that piece.’ And then I was so impressed because he made me rewrite it eight times. He pushed me to fictionalise. I did it initially as a critical piece. I then redid it and redid it. He kept pushing me and I was going, ‘I’m a small white girl from South Africa, how can I write a black gay composer in America?’ (Laughs) Ntone just pushed, ‘Get into the music. Come back when you’re done.’ And I did. And that was the first piece I did for Chimurenga. And then I did their website.

“I never formally started at the magazine. It’s just that I started working so much that eventually you realize, ‘This is all I actually do’? It was just natural that I started working with Chimurenga.”

Stacy and I talk about double issue 12/13, the 2008 publication that was one of the launch pads for the current explosion of African speculative fiction.

Stacy: “That was the issue I worked as an editor on. Chimurenga comes into science fiction politically—which is the search for other worlds, the idea of trying to propose and dream other worlds. In a way Chimurenga is the science fiction project inherently. It’s that wonderful Sun Ra line, ‘We’ve done what was possible and that didn’t work, so it’s time to do the impossible.’ Just on that level Chimurenga operates as science fiction, always trying to do the impossible, too much with too little—and too few people. It’s always dreaming huge and Ntone dreams universes. He can’t think in planets. And that’s a gift.

“Back to the issue. The question of African science fiction started floating around. (At the time) it was done in this terrible way of ... I mean there was something of the, ‘Oh there is this genre in the West that exists for various historical reasons and has its roots in a very specific history and now we must find it in Africa. We must now come and bring it here.’ And the irony of it is that Africans have always written--as long as writing has been—have written in ways that are speculative, and dreaming in ways that are speculative.

“One could almost argue that if one looks historically or pre-colonially, the whole thinking was more speculative than the current world which is based on rationality? So it’s a continent of enormous contradictions where technology sits very comfortably alongside (pauses) the non-technological, the biological.

“Africa does not work through the dialectic. It’s a place where contradictions have always lived comfortably side by side. And continue to live comfortably, and it’s why it’s so difficult to talk about Africa and why people end up saying this stuff is complex. Because there isn’t an easy way of saying it. Because it isn’t easy. And it shouldn’t be and doesn’t have to be. Those irresolvable contradictions are necessary and important to the beauty of the place.

“The experience of living in Africa is already time travel. You are living in spaces where things in some moments seem to be happening thousands of years ago and in some moments seem to be happening in the future. It’s already a space in which time is not operating in this linear march.”

At this point in the interview, I show Stacy one of my photos from a friend’s farm in northwest Nigeria’s farm—oxen pulling ploughs and him in his ceremonial religious robes.

Stacy: “That is life in most of the continent, those contradictions live side-by-side very happily and comfortably. That is life. This linear march ... it’s why I get a bit of a stutter when the word science fiction is thrown out.

“It seems to me to be very much based on the idea that now we must progress and that how we progress is technologically. And I just don’t believe that the continent works that way. We talk about a future as if it is something we need to march towards. I don’t think that this is how life is happening. I don’t think that that’s a reality on the ground. I think that the future is existing with the deep past and all in the same timespace. Africa is already a time travel machine. That it should have science fiction or speculative fiction is no mystery.

“It (Western science fiction) always seems to imply progress and that progress is tied to technology and a very specific idea of what technology is and how it should be used. That’s not going to offer us any kind of answer, or any kind of future. That dream is a Western dream and it’s been imposed on the continent.”

She talks about her reading of African speculative fiction.

“Tutuola—he’s fabulous. I was incredibly struck by the device of the invisible magic missive that he uses to get into the bush of ghosts (from the book My Life in the Bush of Ghosts).

“Sony (Lab'ou) Tansi is a fabulous Congolese writer. He works with satire, political satire, writing against colonialism and then the postcolonial condition. He’s often set in imagined countries. He was working in satire like so many people at the time because you would have been killed if you put it in straight. The kingdoms he invents are often full of strange technologies.

“(His novel) A Life and a Half for example has what he calls Radio Flies, that seem to me to be drones. They intercept messages and they transmit things and they kind of buzz around and observe what’s going down. My favourite of his. It was brought out recently by Indiana University Press.

 “He does a lot of body spec. In one of his novels, The Shameful State (also published in translation by Indiana University Press), a dictator has a hernia and the hernia is running the country. (Laughs) The hernia just grows and grows and takes over. So he also plays a lot with the physical, the grotesque, the bodily in absolutely fabulous ways, and he is for me in terms of the Francophone writers one of the great science fiction writers from Africa. I’ve long wanted to do an essay about Tansi and his speculative nature.”

Stacy goes on to mention other writers. Ursula LeGuin, Philip K Dick, Connie Willis, and Samuel Delaney.

“Samuel Delany—it’s not just how he enters the science fiction (space), it’s how he writes bodies. I entered Delany via Hogg. Its one of Samuel Delany’s non-science fiction books, so to speak, so to speak. (Laughs) But if sex could be speculative ... What Delany did in that book, he asked the question ... the dichotomy between clean and dirty, the ultimate dichotomy that the West is built on. And he wants to attack that dichotomy and he goes in hard.

“Just stylistically, Delany’s ability to write sentences, to write details, how he writes the body in all his books, whether they’re science fiction or not ... there’s something of that ability to both create worlds but also to create physical characters, characters who have physicality ... Tansi does a similar thing. There’s an incredible viscerality to his writing. The witting is sensual; it’s disgusting, it’s erotic.”

I steer the conversation back to the double issue 12/13.

Stacy: “A lot of that issue was about trying to reframe and reposition how we understood the discussion. It was born out of like, ‘This is not a new conversation.’ Everyone was talking about science fiction because Lauren Beukes had arrived (Laughs). I love Lauren dearly, but no, sorry. It was an attempt to say no, and to do what Chimurenga does best, which is to look at the possibility of looking at other worlds, through questions around technology, time, the future. And I also wrote for that issue. It’s (the story) based on Terminator. Called ‘Terminated.’ Its real science fiction element is that it uses a scene from the movie. The children that she (the main character) watches are re-enacting the movie, but she starts to build on it and make it, her own science fiction movie. It’s my own preoccupation with technology, the body, and sexuality.”

GR: “Why a double issue?”

Stacy: “(Sighs. Thinks.) We wanted to do two things. We wanted to speak to the questions philosophically and explore those questions in a non-fictitious way. At the same time, we were looking at an enormous amount of fabulous fiction. And I suppose the decision to divide them was because that sometimes there is a wonderful pleasure in how fiction can fit together.

“So the decision was to place those fictions together and let them speak to each other and take you on a fictional journey. And we didn’t want to do the normal Chimurenga thing, which is to flow quite smoothly between fiction and nonfiction.”

I then said shamefaced that I hadn’t noticed that one was fiction and one side was not fiction.

Chimurenga issues 12/13 printed back to back—flip them over and get a different magazine

Stacy: “Good! Then we succeeded. That’s the essential divide between the double issue, where the boundary was drawn, and part of Chimurenga’s task is shattering those boundaries. The pieces lean towards the philosophical and other pieces lean more to fiction, but both do both at the same time.”

I mention how prophetic the double issue was, with articles on Afrofuturism, and an excerpt from Nnedi Okorafor. It isn’t always speculative. Its most famous story was “Stickfighting Days” by Olufemi Terry, a mainstream story that won the 2010 Caine Prize. I was pleased to see an SF story from Pete Kalu, a key figure in Common Word in Manchester. The Manchester Review 18 that I edited, collecting historically important African spec fiction, reprinted two stories from this issue of Chimurenga: Pete Kalu’s story “Doppelgänger” and Doreen Baingana’s “Eden’s Burning.”

Stacy: “My favorite find for that issue was Jean Lamore. Now he’s a fascinating cat who you have to track down. French writer. We excerpted his novel AKA. I came across it because I hunt down strange rarities online. It’s my hobby I think. It was printed by a tiny imprint that then vanished. It’s done in English but he’s a French writer. What he does that’s so fantastic in that book is that he grabs onto all the artists on the Continent who are working with speculative fictions in their work. (In the issue, the excerpt is called ‘Cobras Coiled’.)

“(Abu B.) Mansaray, he does those fabulous machine drawings, he’s included in the issue too. In that book by Jean Lamore, he uses the visions created by the artists and they come to life in the novel and the world he’s in. Many of these things you will recognize if you know African art. Travelling back to unknown artists.

“There’s been this art-world question of how does one write a history of art book in Africa, and I’ve always wanted to say ‘Actually, Jean Lamore’s science fiction book is a history of African art.’ You can recognize them if you know your African art.

“I was recently having a conversation with Kojo Eshun who reads Mansaray’s artwork as asking the question, ‘What happens if spirits get weaponized by Western technology?’”

I mention that one of Comic Republic’s comics is exactly that idea—the USA is buying up African spirituality and turning it into weapons.

Stacy: “For me that’s an enormously exciting concept. Someone who wasn’t in the issue but you should be looking out for speaking about the French-speaking world is Werewere Liking. She is a Cameroonian, currently lives in Cote d’Ivoire, writes in French and she works in theatre as well as being a painter. Many of her operas and plays are incredibly speculative in their imaginings, dealing with a fantastical realm of future-past-present, deep-history Gods. She’s got one slim little novella called (in the English translation) It Shall Be of Jasper and Coral. In which she proposes a future race, absolutely fabulous in terms of African speculative fiction, that’s never noticed or talked about. She’s definitely someone to add to the list.”

I ask her about The Chronic, the newspaper that Chimurenga created that was dated 2008 but published in 2011. The first issue was concerned with violence against African migrants to South Africa.

Stacy: “As soon as the xenophobic violence broke out—w—one of the things we didn’t want to do was describe it then as the Emergency. Because the Emergency is always a myth. We apparently now have the Migrant Emergency. Which is a myth. It’s been going on for how many years now? (Laughs) And suddenly it’s an emergency and all the attention is drawn to it.

“Similarly that xenophobic violence was rooted in a huge history. It had been ongoing for an incredibly long time before it reached the crisis, which allows the media in the West to talk about it or think about it. It was urgent for us to not work from that space? So, it took a while.

“Newspapers are inherently a tool of time. The whole of Western history is built on newspaper time. You can go back to the archives and find what happened on that day because of the newspapers. It’s a tool whereby you can keep time. When you start talking about a pan-African newspaper, there’s an opportunity to intervene in that process of the newspaper being the marker of linear time, the eternal march forward. And intervene in the idea of journalism as always springing from or writing to the emergency.

“So the idea of doing the time travel (printing a newspaper in 2011 that was dated 2008) was the opportunity for us writers to place themselves back in the past, to write from that moment now. To force writers to move out of our ideas about the present-past-future. To write from the past as the present, so to speak. An enormously interesting way to change how we think about and how we write about past and present.

“To the person getting it, it is a time travel machine. It is dated in the past but out on that day, brand new but back in time. I’m a great believer in strange African technologies. This is a simple, low-tech/high-tech device that lets you time travel.”

The Chronic, sort of issue no 3, The Corpse Exhibition. It won the 2017 Nommo Award for best graphic novel by Africans, but is in fact a compilation of work, including an adaptation of Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkerd and Nikhil Singh’s interpretation of B. Kojo Laing’s Major Gentil and the Achimoto Wars. Oh, and jazz music transposed into images. It comes with a translation into Korean.

Stacy: “I don’t consider myself by any means a speculative writer or a science fiction writer, strictly speaking. But a lot of my stuff bleeds into the space of speculation, and because I’m consuming a lot of science fiction, and I’m asking questions about the fluidity of the past and trying to break some of these boundaries, I suppose a lot of my work does lean towards writing about the alienation of bodies or about our relationship with technologies.

“I’ve got a collection that came out in 2013 called Because the Night.  My more speculative stuff happened after that collection. The most recent writing is when I delved more deeply into ... I've always believed that the line between what is real and what is not real is incredibly fluid, and I‘ve always tried to write against that particular dialectic.

“The more recent writing is largely published online in American journals because I don’t really find easily a home in South Africa other than Chimurenga, which is not in South Africa anyway. It’s a satellite floating off the continent. This piece (“Involution”) that was published in Short Story Day Africa was one of the first pieces I’ve had published in South Africa in ten years. (Laughs).

“I’ve got a very speculative piece (‘A Butcher’s Fantasy’) in The New Orleans Review, the same issue as ‘The Armed Letter Writers’ by Olufunke Ogundimu (one of the other Caine Prize nominees). It’s about a person who finds that they live inside a cow. It ruminates about the questions how did they get there? Why do they live inside a cow? They have a fantasy about the Butcher who will come and save them from the cow. That I suppose is speculative. Asking the same questions about bodies, the boundaries between our bodies and other people’s bodies.

“‘The Aesthetic of Rat Bites’ was quite a science fiction piece as well, and was published in Joyland online. That looks at a future when rats have overrun everything to the point that rat bites have become so common that they are seen as fashionable. It tries to unpack what the aesthetic of these rat bites is and how they find their way into fashion and life.

“Another story with spec elements in it is ‘Archaeology of Holes’ in Black Sun Lit.

“A time travel story is ‘The Sky over Luanda,’ in Drunken Boat. Time and space get fractured in that piece. It’s about my relationship with an Angolan musician called Victor Gamaret. He exists, and he spent a lot of time walking in the desert. It tracks his journey in the deserts. That starts to split timewise and space-wise. Drunken Boat is one of the oldest digital magazines, co-founded in 1999 by Ravi Shankar. (At the time of writing in 2018 the site was down.)

“The last piece published online was in The Johannesburg Review of Books. Everyone was writing dystopia. I thought I would write a utopian science fiction story as I call it. It’s set in a future where one day the white people in South Africa all wake up and realize the horror that they’ve perpetuated and continue to perpetuate, and voluntarily together all the white people in the country march into the sea.

“I write a lot. I’ve got a collection nearly ready. I just need to cut it down. I’m one of those terrible writers that hate everything I write, and the older I get, the more I hate and I keep wanting to throw everything out; but I’ve had a nice kick in my ass from here (the Caine Prize gathering) to get it together and get it out now. So a second collection is likely.”

Then, Stacy goes back to talking about her favourite writers.

“I also think that Bessie Head’s A Question of Power should be included in African science fiction. She’s a South African writer but she found more of a home in Botswana. It’s called a feminist novel but she has in it an incredibly powerful critique of Western technology. It charts a woman’s descent into madness, but in her fantasies are these women who are machine women. They are cyborgs. The fantasies—it’s blurry if this is really happening or is in her broken-down mental state—are full of beautiful descriptions of cyborgs. She has Mrs Sewing Machine who is a sex cyborg who comes to taunt her. She fucks and she fucks better than the narrator will ever be able to fuck, and there’s Miss Belly Button. You insert coins into her and she keeps dancing. It’s in terms of the cyborg sex fantasy before the sex cyborg became such a mainstream image.”

(The Bessie Head Literary Award was founded in her honour. Check out the Bessie Head home page)

I ask Stacy if there is anything she’d like to say to round off.

Stacy: “You can’t ask me to round off. I’m not a very good rounder-offer. I’m always travelling forwards and backwards too quickly. You have to give me a better provocation than that round it off.”

GR: “OK, is there something you passionately want to say?

Stacy: “That you don’t need to look for science fiction in Africa, because Africa is already a science-fiction-and-speculative place where the boundaries between future and past have evaporated and are evaporating. So ninety per cent of what has been written from that other world is other-worldly science fiction.”

I then remember that I first heard of her in connection with her teaching of creative writing and the interview explodes all over again.

Stacy: “I also have been teaching at Rhodes University. Oh! I must tell you about my teaching! I’ve got students. I’ve got a book for you that I must get to you by a young writer, Unathi Slasha. Much more into speculative ... if I had to put it more into (a category and having) this Western obsession with genre, and knowing my Western genres quite well, and knowing the American scene quite well, what the Americans are calling Bizarro? It’s the closest I can come to …(Pauses) if I look for a home, who’s doing shit like Unathi.

“It’s his first book as a young writer. He lives in Despatch, which is a harrowing township. As in despatching a parcel, just outside of Port Elizabeth. Currently still lives there, lives the township life. He is producing the most amazing ... he’s got an idea around it, trying to write where language hasn’t reached. He’s so articulate and smart. He’s a miracle. You want science fiction? Where the fuck did this kid come from, he’s read as much as I have.

“Jah Hills (Unathi’s book) is published by Black Ghost, which is a small publishing company run by Lesego Rampolokeng the poet, who writes what I would call science fiction poetry.

"Jah Hills is the name of the hills where the novel takes place. He (Unathi) uses and subverts Nguni mythology if you want to call it that. But he spins it ... he sets it in a contemporary era in that it’s not a past that’s gone away. It’s very much part of his reality, so what he’s writing ... he’s not writing mythology. It’s a life people live in the contemporary. He just brings the wildness of that space to insane levels.

“His theory is that he’s trying to write the unknown witch world. He’s saying that there are ideas and concepts that haven’t been translated into language because they don’t translate easily, especially not English. They’re almost resistant to English. His book is an attempt to use the English language to write the unlanguaged world. The world that doesn’t get written about and can barely be spoken and is part of his life.

“And that fluidity of time where he lives in a very contemporary township where technology exists, cell phones, everything exists, but at the same time it’s a travel back into a deep past and a mythological past, those lives, those worlds. He writes that compacting into the expansions of time ... (Pauses) And he’s so articulate. He talks about the stuff so much better than I’m doing now.

“He wrote a very long beautiful essay critiquing South African writing. Thirty-page essay. No one would publish it. We had to put it up on the Black Ghost website ourselves. Everyone was like ‘Thirty pages?’ He really attacks a lot of South Africans as well. He says their writing is banal and boring and dead.

“When I was first exposed to African writing, that was my experience. It was like Chinua Achebe, the stuff you’re given (to read in African schools?) ... and I was like, ‘Errrr.’ And then I started to realize there was other stuff out there, the Sony Lab'ou Tansis, and you just have to dig below the surface.

“Reikanne Mofokeng has also done science fiction. Now his stuff is straight sci-fi sci-fi. He would be approved of by Wale (Talabi, another one of the Caine Prize nominees). He comes from a hip-hop background. He’s coming to the form from the hip-hop science fiction imagination, which is a big part of the African American science fiction imagination. He’s also a coder ... I don’t know what his official title is but he works in code and computers, so he’s proposing other worlds from a tech-based background. He’s based in Joburg. Very different to Unathi, a township boy. Reikanne’s a city boy, hip-hop community.”

The SEALS digital commons has this description of Reikanne’s creative writing thesis.

My thesis is a science fiction novella. It follows the story of an adolescent boy, Shadow, and a little girl, Makebelieve, in an ahistorical future. The world that they traverse is earth, after being nursed back to health, by technologically advanced Southern African societies. A series of inexplicable astronomical events leads to their being hunted down. Through the travels of Shadow and Makebelieve I show how the world and the societies around them operate. I am inspired by Samuel R Delaney’s Aye, Gomorrah and Derrick Bell’s The Space Traders, because of their prowess in world building and exploration of complex and innovative ideas.

It’s pretty evident that Stacy loves teaching creative writing, despite the difficulties of university life in South Africa.

Stacy: “I love it. Look, it’s a double bind. I was teaching with Lesego Rampolokeng. We’ve published him in Chimurenga. He’s an older generation, very political, very fiery kind of stuff. I was teaching with him and he was too black, so he got chucked out.

“I found Rhodes a difficult place to teach in. The name says it all. I think there is a lot of work to be done on transformation. So I found the space operating in there difficult. That being said, my students are fantastic, fantastic, fantastic.

“I truly am excited about South African literature in ways I haven’t been. I banished myself from South African literature. I stopped reading it in fact because I think most of what’s being published is so boring. There are fabulous young black writers out there. Why they are not being published in droves I don’t know. I have six books that should be published. There’s a young generation coming out. They’re taking risks, they’re taking chances, they’re experimenting. They’re brave, they’re bold, they’re reading. I’m incredibly hopeful for South Africa based on the young people. They’re fiery, they’re politicised. There is a whole generation coming.”

Stacy didn’t win the Caine Prize, but I don’t think she minded in the least.

You can buy downloadable PDFs of most Chimurenga publications including the 2008 double issue and the 2016 issue of The Chronic that won the Nommo Award for best graphic novel from the Chimurenga website.

An information box about the Francophone writers Stacy talks about and some others is included in this chapter.

(Next)

Samuel Kolawole

He turned to face the execution post. The anticipation he had felt wilted. In despair, he closed his eyes. The sun seared. What a day to die.

He closed his eyes and let his other senses take over. He allowed the smell of unwashed bodies and human waste to fill him. The voices around him became liquid and slow. He thought he heard a voice telling him to move. He felt a face looming close. He could feel hot, rancid breath. The voice sounded stretched, a bad cassette.

He heard a familiar voice. It pierced through the din of liquid voices, invaded his senses. The voice called his name. The voice was silky. It glided through the air. It wrapped itself around his head. No one called his name that way, no one. No voice had the power to draw him that way. A strange, sweet sensation brewed in his head then spread all the way down his spine. He turned. His eyes found hers. She was there with her brightness, and her smiles, her assurances. A flood of relief washed over him.

Lawrence finally inched towards the post, one jagged movement after the other, taking a step with his right leg then dragging the stump his left leg had become. The noise turned into murmurs and murmurs morphed into near silence. The officer in charge made his declaration and the soldiers held Lawrence against one of the stakes with fat ropes. The hallowed priests emerged from the crowd in their saintly robes for the last rites.

Ovbigbo, the Law. Ovbigbo, the man covered head to toe with charms that made his body resistant to bullets. Ovbigbo, the man robed with the cloak of invisibility. Ovbigbo, the custodian of the magic mirror that revealed the movements and location of his enemies. Ovbigbo, the Jannes and Jambres of Bendel State, the man who threw his belt to the ground and it became an attacking serpent. Ovbigbo, who drove from Sapele to Benin in reverse gear, and was capable of picking up a clod from the ground while driving at hundred kilometres per hour! Ovbigbo whose real name was Lawrence Nomanyagbon Anini. Ovbigbo, the man who sent fear into the hearts of the enforcers of the law knew his time was not up. He would die one day. That day was just not today. When that day came he would turn himself into a hill. Strong. Formidable.

From Son of a Dog

Samuel Kolawole is a Nigerian ex-pat living in South Africa. Nigeria may be Africa’s biggest economy—at one time roughly a third bigger than South Africa. But South Africa still offers advantages of infrastructure—in 2016 when this interview took place, the credit card system in South Africa meant you could buy electronic versions of books and magazines. Something you couldn’t do in many African countries. (Publishers please note: if your journal is available for purchase on the web, payable by card or Paypal, it is inaccessible in many African countries.)

The electricity in South Africa is by and large ON. In Nigeria it is by and large OFF, unless you run a generator. The transport system is more comfortable in South Africa; and in 2016, if you turned on a tap, there was water (things were to be a bit different only 18 months later).

But coming from Nigeria means that Samuel is privileged relative to many black South Africans.

In Nigeria, a university education is expected of people of even modest backgrounds. If you are black there are fewer structural barriers against you—and less to break your pride—than there seem to be in South Africa. South Africa’s history is so violently dislocating that you can almost see black South Africans having to snap their shoulders back into place. For an idea of the frustrations that some black South Africans feel, read the interview in this series with Panashe Chigumadzi.

Samuel Kolawole is a happy man. He laughs continuously in a range of sounds from growls, to yelps, to a high-pitched chuckle, to a sound like someone opening a fizzy bottle of tonic.

At the time of the interview, he was doing a postgraduate degree at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. We met halfway between Grahamstown and Cape Town in Port Elizabeth airport. So the recording is full of the clattering and conversation of an airport café.

Samuel attended Clarion West, the prestigious science fiction workshop in the USA (other African graduates include Chinelo Onwualu). But he says this does not mean he’s particularly interested in science fiction. “More the fantastic than science fiction.”

He’s somewhat older and more experienced than some of the writers interviewed for this series. He’s part of the post-2008 wave of publishing, with stories appearing in the journal Jungle Jim edited by Jenna Bass.

His 2011 story “Mules of Fortune” is listed by Jenna as one of her favourite stories in the magazine’s history. It’s multi-viewpoint and an extreme picture of the horrors of war. Bass says that it “really tests the boundaries of what a ‘horror’ tale can be.” The story is also available online in excerpts on Publishmystory Blogspot.

Samuel says, of “Mules of Fortune”, “I’m drawn to supernatural stories, weird stories, but stories that are rendered against a backdrop of real events, some kind of historical reality.

“I’ve always been fascinated by war stories and by the so-called magical aspect of war stories. For example during the Liberian war there were soldiers that were told to wear amulets that would protect them against bullets. There’s a scene in ‘Mules of Fortune’ where someone wants to demonstrate his powers and cuts someone’s tongue. I know of places like DRC where they test machetes on themselves to prove they cannot be killed. My role is not to say whether those things are real or not. I just want to interrogate and explore.

“The same with Son of a Dog (Samuel’s recently finished novel). It’s about writing against history, writing my own history. Son of a Dog is based on a real-life story of a gangster who terrorized the country in the 1980s, called Lawrence Amimi. He was rumoured to have magical powers, which drew me to the story.

“In Yoruba mythology the marketplace is the place of intersection between the spirit world and the physical realm. So there’s this scene in my novel where the protagonist is being chased by the police into the marketplace and it’s an opening into this world where people are walking on their heads upside down.

“This is not just something from our imagination. We grew up hearing about these things. There have been stories about it and some of us even believe the stories. The authenticity matters and African writing comes across as authentic.”

His short story, “The Praegustator Who Spied on the World” was published in The New Black Magazine. It has an unusual genesis.

Samuel: “I was in Uganda teaching a writing workshop and I met Idi Amin’s grandson. He’s an artist. We got talking about his grandfather—what he was like. About a year after that, I read about a woman who used to be Adolf Hitler’s food taster, now about 90 years old. And I thought, wow. That really fascinated me. I wanted to writer about her, but in Africa? Where in Africa? Uganda.”

We talk about Nigerian fiction. I say that what he talks about reminds me a lot of Amos Tutuola. He responds. “He’s also from the Yoruba tribe. My tribe.” We talk about Ken Saro Wiwa’s Sozaboy and how the narrator never realizes that he’s dead.

Samuel: “In Yoruba mythology we call that alobayida. Dying and not knowing. In fact sometimes you die and show up in another place.”

“These beliefs form the very core of our oral tradition. I hear so many interesting stories. I had a collection called The Book of M (from Serendipity Books, 2011). Some of the stories were inspired by stories my grandmother and mother told me about life in the military era and some strange things that happened.”

“My first collection had 14 stories. It was published in Nigeria. ‘Mules of Fortune’ was included, also some of my stories that were later published in the USA in journals like East Town Fiction and Superstition Review (the story is “Mud, if it were Gold”). That’s the last story in the book and it’s not fantastic.

GR: “It’s in a magazine called the Superstition Review and it’s not supernatural?”

Samuel: (Laughs.) “No. It’s not.”

I ask Samuel the usual biographical questions.

Samuel: “So I start publishing in 2010. I’m from Ondo State but I grew up in Ibadan. My dad was actually the first marketing director of the first TV station in Africa, called WNTV, which later became NTA, the Nigerian Television Authority.

“I went to the University of Ibadan. I had a mentor, Professor Femi Osafisan the poet. It wasn’t like he taught me in school or anything. I just connected with him. He’s one of the people I look up to. I do write poetry, but I don’t consider myself a poet. (Laughs for quite a long time).”

We talk about D. O. Fagunwa, a writer of traditionally inspired tales. His first novel was notably translated by Wole Soyinka as Forest of a Thousand Demons.

Samuel: “It's not science fiction. When I was growing up we had to study Fagunwa. It was part of the requirement for Yoruba literature. We studied about seven instalments. The Yoruba text is more powerful.

“I was 17 when I read The Famished Road by Ben Okri. The main reason I started writing.

“You know when you are a teenager you have this personal crisis? I didn’t know what to do with my life. I was getting very depressed. So I locked myself up in my room for days and did not come out.

“I always had books around me. My father had this big library and there were always books all over the house. I got bored and I started reading, everything I could get my hands on, and one day I decided to start writing. I just picked up my pen one day and started writing.

“I didn’t show anybody. But then one day I was in conversation with one of my neighbours, I said to him ‘I’m writing something.’ ‘Oh, let me see, let me see what you are writing.’ So he read some of my stuff, and was like ‘Wow what is this, you should continue.’ So that’s how I stated writing. It came out of depression (Laughs).

“My parents wanted me to be a doctor actually. (Laughs more) I had a lot of issues with my father for years until I started doing well. (Laughs) And now he stalks me on Facebook. He does all sorts. (Laughs)”

GR: “He just wants you to be happy. And rich. And someone they can boast about. Do you have any brothers and sisters?”

Samuel: “I have eleven siblings. Eleven. Five brothers, two half brothers, four half sisters.

GR: “How many are doctors?”

Samuel: “We have one doctor. We engineers, accountants. (Laughs) My father is very proud of me now. (Laughs)”

He’s doing a Masters at Rhodes, but will start his PhD in 2017. How does he find Rhodes?

Samuel: “Wonderful, wonderful. My department is the only thing I like about South Africa. (Laughs) I don’t like this country. I don’t like the spirit. I think the racism and prejudice here is unbelievable. I don’t know how this country got here. There’s a still a lot to do.

“The first time I visited South Africa was 2013. It was my first time and they treated me well. I even had a host; I was hosted by white writers. But living here ... fast forward two years later. I’ve been here about one year now. It’s a different experience living and visiting.

“When you live here you see firsthand the level of racism. On the one hand the whites and black thing. And there’s the way black South Africans treat foreigners from other parts of Africa. Generally, people don’t trust easily here, people are very suspicious. I come from a country—we have issues in my country too, but we don’t have issues like this. The first four months for me was really tough.

“Interestingly I went to America for the Easter break. The moment I landed in New York it was as if I breathing fresh air. (Laughs) I was like, ‘Thank God I am out of that country for a while.’ (Laughs) And then I spent two weeks in California and then went back to South Africa. Which is also very ironic.”

We talk about the FeesMustFall movement that was big at the time of the interview. Students were demanding that fees for all students fell and were striking. The question for a time was: would exams happen?

Samuel: “Exams happened at Rhodes. Students were given the choice of writing their exams immediately and go home or writing in January. Some were given home exams. But there was a lot of police presence on campus.

“I think this is a viscous circle. I think this happened this last year-end of the session. And they’ll they say, let's talk, let's have a dialogue, blah blah blah. And then they refuse to do anything about it. I’m not even sure if the government of Jacob Zuma even wants to address the situation in any way. They have kids who don’t study in South Africa. But then Nigerians don’t send their kids to Nigerian schools. I was saying to my classmates, why don’t you take this party to the Parliament?

“What I’ve noticed about South Africa is a culture of dependency. In Nigeria when I was in school, there were students who sold recharge cards for airtime. I had to pay for school. There were mothers who hawked eggs and soft drinks to pay the school fees. I did a lot of things to pay for my school fees. I don’t see that spirit here. In Lagos it is very rare to be idle. In this country they believe everything has to be done by the government for them.

“One of the things the government can do here is give out soft loans for small scale businesses and allow students to do stuff to make money and empower students. But government don’t want to empower students because if you empower someone you set that person free.

“When I got admitted into this programme I requested a scholarship. They said no, because I’m an international student. We have ten students; six of the students are on scholarship, black students. Full scholarships and bursaries to the tune of ninety thousand rand, some of them. I paid my way through school this year. I paid a lot of money. I had to work, do some part-time jobs to be able to pay my way and I was happy to do that.”

I ask Samuel if he finds the curriculum to be de-colonised.

Samuel: “My department is quite unique. Our lecturers and professors are people who understand these things, understand what it means to decolonize, but they shifted from the colonial text and shifted to American literature. (Laughs) So now they are saying no, the dependence on American literature is too much, let us bring in more African texts and all of that.

“That’s a lot better than the English department at Rhodes. (He’s in Creative Writing.) You know! (Laughs) Conrad. Yeats. (Laughs). The English Department is like most English departments in South Africa. That’s all I have to say.”

Samuel was the head of the team of judges for Short Story Day Africa’s 2015 SFF anthology Terra Incognita. There were a lot of raised eyebrows—about three-quarters of the African writers were white. Rachel Zadok in her interview for the series also talks about Terra Incognita.

Samuel: “Interesting that you even ... because we judged blindly. I didn’t realize who the authors were. I just read the stories for the quality and strength of the story.”

When you saw the list, how did you account for it?

Samuel: “As a Nigerian the way people think here is not the way I think. I don’t think in terms of ‘Oh this thing is black, why are there so many white people here?’ I didn’t grow up with that problem in Nigeria, ‘Oh there are too many white people here.’ I wasn’t even thinking along those lines. Just, ‘Oh this guy won, good story.’

“In South Africa, the publishing industry is actually built around white literature, South African whites, the white establishment, Afrikaans and English, the Exclusive Books of this world, and the publishers. And also because most of the readers are middle class and white, in Afrikaans and English.

“There are independent publishers that are breaking out of that mould. There is one founded by the person who started my programme Robert Berolds called Deep South Publishers. Also Black Ghost that is that is just starting now from our Department, Stacy Hardy and Lesego Rampolokeng.

“My department really believes in innovative fiction, fiction that really goes out of frame. In this country I’ve met only one or two publishers who really really love literature. Most of them are just businessmen and women.

“I’m a drifter in a way. I’m not sure I’m going back to Nigeria at least to live. I’ll probably bounce around for a bit.”

Samuel’s list of fellowships and grants is impressive. In addition to Clarion West, he’s been a Norman Mailer Fiction fellow and was a fiction Fellow at Salt Lake City, was a writer in residences at the Wellstone Centre in Redwood, California, and was an honorary fellow at the University of Iowa—and that’s not all of them. He also attended Clarion West and won a Prince Claus Award for services to culture.

Samuel: “Americans always want to believe that everything revolves around them. But apart from that I really enjoyed myself. I learned a lot too. Some of the things I built on, I learned there. In the future I hope to write more ... (Laughs) science fiction.”

The week after we spoke he was scheduled to teach classes at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. That gets us talking about how many people thought that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o would win the Nobel Prize that year, and from there to the language issue.

Samuel: “Ngũgĩ taught me in 2008. At a workshop of the Port Harcourt Literary Festival (in Nigeria). Because of our colonial legacy, I’ve realized that the way I write is that I don’t think in English. I think in my mother tongue, Yoruba. But I write in English. Interesting. That occurred to me just now.”

So was his schooling in Yoruba?

Samuel: “No. English, language of instruction—everything in English. But you were given the opportunity to choose one language: Yoruba, Igbo, or Hausa. Once you choose, you read a lot. I’ve read a lot of Yoruba literature, a lot.”

Another aspect of Samuel’s rich CV—he was the founder in 2013 of The Writers Studio.

Samuel: “Let me tell you a bit about Nigeria and the literary life. Nigeria is not a conducive place to write or to practice your craft as a writer. That’s why a lot of us have moved, and more people will continue to move; and I encourage people to move and tell them, ‘You will come back and make changes.’ I started a school called The Writer’s Studio. We did Uganda; we went to South Africa.

“When I started I took my rent for one year and I invested it into the school and I moved my things into my parents’ house. At my age. (Laughs.) We started it and it worked for a while, but then I need investment and nobody wanted to finance us. So I decided, ‘Come on, I’m not going to kill myself because of this. Let me spend more time to focus on my own writing.’

“Like so many other things that start in Nigeria, people just become frustrated by the system. The government. I became frustrated. I’m a drifter in a way. I’m not sure if I’m going back to Nigeria at least to live. I’ll probably bounce around for a bit.”

“But I still believe that we need to build our own systems if we are going to be given the opportunity to tell out own stories. So I would say to people, go build your own systems. Don’t blame the Caine Prize for selecting certain kinds of stories; don’t blame the Booker Prize. Go make your own.”

(Next)

The monorail snaked upriver through the thick teak forest canopy and occasionally out into the daylight. The bursts of sunlight grew more frequent, but less harsh as the day faded into the west. Rather than an end to the day, the night was about to bring Paula to the beginning of the real journey.

For the first time since leaving the plane at Muanda Airport, now 130 kilometres behind her, she was able to take in the view of the vast body of water stretching out 50 metres below. It always took a moment to realise she was not looking at a lake or a separation of continents, but rather the second largest river in the world. The light warmed her face. She closed her eyes and imagined the Congo River seen from high above: the satellite images of a continent in the Earth’s shadow, a vein of silver beginning at one end and flowing into a crescent moon, nearly slicing it in half. Emerging from a once dark continent, it was not sunlight or moonlight that was visible along those waters. It was the mass of energy generated by the metric tons of water pulsating through that vein, that African heart, lighting and nurturing the towns and cities along its banks, creating the Land of Light.

“The Land of Light” from Imagine Africa 500

Stephen Embleton’s ‘Land of Light’ is the penultimate story in Imagine Africa 500, the anthology published by Shadreck Chikoti and edited by Billy Kahora. It’s personal, humanist SF. On a supertrain crossing the Congo River, a daughter appears to be having a conversation with her father. It’s moving, credible, and beautifully written, and I chose it to be reprinted in The Manchester Review special issue 18, one of twenty-one stories selected to represent the history of African SFF. So you can take it as read, I thought the story was very good. Stephen’s graphic and web skills have also been invaluable in running the ASFS website.

The interview, however, turned out to be as much about South Africa’s history and the history of the internet as it was about African speculative fiction or Stephen’s work.

Stephen was twenty years old when apartheid ended in 1994.

“I studied graphic design from 1992 to 1995. I was starting my student career just as apartheid was ending. I was twenty so my first voting was in the 1994 elections. It was an absolute eye-opener. I voted for the Democratic Party nationally (read about the DP on the SA history website) and for the Inkatha Freedom Party locally. Definitely a good time to be a twenty-year-old.”

GR: “Nick Wood talks about how he was made to do commando training in school. The teachers blacked up and the students practiced shooting them. Did you have to do that?”

Stephen: “No. We had Cadets. That was about the worst of it. That was regimental marching on rugby fields. There was no boot camp.

“My brother Michael was a year ahead of me. He applied for graphic design but didn’t get in. That was in ’91 and ’92. He then had to serve, so it was in either the army or the police force, and he chose the police force. Which was two years instead of one year, but the pay was better.

GR: “What does your brother say about being a policeman?”

Stephen: “Best thing in the world. He has all these horror stories. I’ve got my brother and two stepbrothers. Mike was in the Brixton Flying Squad, which is in Joburg, which was one of the most notorious police units. Flying Squad are the first on the scene for most things.

“So Mike was in the thick of the riots going into the townships. He tells stories of going into the hostels, you know, going into all the rooms, and the horrific living conditions in those crammed spaces. It was interesting getting that kind of view while everything was unfolding.

“My stepbrother Marc also went into the police. He then got into the child protection unit. He’s still involved in child protection but private. I think to a certain extent they both enjoyed the experiences but said it was quite horrific … but they were both involved for good or bad.

“Mike left the police force in 2003 or 2002. He never wanted to be a desk jockey. He wanted to be in the thick of it and he needed to get more money, so he ended up trading downtown Joburg for Baghdad. (Shakes head, chuckles.) You know, you joke about the two extremes but for him they were both the same. How the fuck do you … I mean, I don’t understand how you cope with it.

"His wife is a trauma nurse now in the private sector, she travels all over the place picking up patients for hospitals. I mean, with that extreme lifestyle, you see the worst of the worst. So I’m glad I went the route I did.

"When I came out (of college), the draft had ended, so there was no obligation to go fighting. I think fucking right. I can’t think of anything worse than doing something that you don’t believe in."

GR: “So how does a graphic designer end up being a writer?”

Stephen: “I never had any interest in writing because I thought that drawing pictures was easier than finding the words to describe things. I would say my first taste of creative writing was in Standard 6 or 7 in high school. I read Cannery Row, John Steinbeck. I wasn’t a big reader. Again, comic books were my life, and cartoons and TV, to such an extent that the family would ask me what was on TV in three days‘ time and I could rattle that off quite happily.

“When I read Cannery Row, I was blown away with his descriptions, painting a picture with words. So literally the next creative writing essay, I incorporated it in what I wrote, down to the dust blowing on the pavement. I thoroughly enjoyed that and got probably my highest mark for an essay ever.

“Movies were a big thing for me. Tarantino is a good example. With dialogue I can spend all day having a conversation with two people on a page. I have these conversations in my head. I always have a dialogue in my head arguing a point of view whether it’s factual or fiction. To write them is quite interesting.

“It was about 2000. I had an idea for a novella. I thought, OK, I would like to write a book. It’s not about publishing it or sharing it with anybody. I’ve got this idea in my head, I need to flesh it out and see where it goes. I’m quite happy for it not to see the light of day.

“I never felt like I needed to go outside of Durban to find fame and fortune. A lot of the guys I studied with all went to Joburg, Cape Town, or even overseas, especially at that time, ’94, ’95 … I firmly believe you can make a success of yourself wherever you are …”

Stephen: “We only started learning things on the Mac in 1993 or 1994 (second year university). Pulling my hair out working on a digital device as opposed to working with charcoal or airbrush.”

Stephen started work in one of the biggest advertising agencies in Durban, and was regularly promoted by them. He mostly worked with print media, but then got into digital design in ’96.

“They approached me as their (web) designer. The other designers weren’t even interested. (I thought) ‘What the fuck do I want to be doing digital stuff for?’ Then ‘The worst that could happen is that I learn something.’ I remember going into the Mission Impossible website and going, ‘Whoa, this is pretty cool.’“

At first, as in the UK, South African web design tried to replicate print media—paper textures onscreen. Stephen’s first web site, for his company Armadillo, won a South African award, the Loerie.

Stephen: “… I was adamant that I wanted this screen to look like something that I was used to, that I was used to touching in the real world. That site particularly had a paper background, and it was in the days when your had your menu down the side, very much in the print old school. The Armadillo logo was an old copperplate illustration from the 1800s.

“The engineers encouraged us to experiment. They helped me set up my own personal website to experiment on, and I started to learn HTML kicking and screaming. It was an opportunity for the lead engineer to experiment with new technology on the back end of it.”

We talk a bit about how clients in those days kept making the same mistakes, like wanting their CEO’s photo on the home pages. In those days, people just plugged directly into the telephone lines. Speeds were slow—and most people didn’t even have that.

Stephen: “Most people weren’t connected. At home, they didn’t know what I was talking about with email, and what I’m actually doing.

On Netscape: a screen grab from the award-winning “Time Traveller” website.

“The first time I saw a web page? I can tell you the one it was. It was for Anansi, a South African version of Google. They had a very basic spider logo and a big yellow banner across the top. I look at the style of websites now. We had engineers on our back trying to get things under 30K. Netscape (one of the first successful browsers) was at its pinnacle and they had released their book, and that was how we wanted to live; we “wanted to sleep under our desks and have an IV drip of caffeine. That was our attitude.

“I would vomit all my rantings on my personal website. That eventually won a personal website award in ’97 in the philosophy category (chuckles).”

 We talk a bit about videotext, a failed platform that came before the internet.

Stephen: “When people told me about the internet, that is what I thought the internet looked like. I was born the year TV was introduced. TV was introduced to South Africa for the first time in 1974. It was very controlled.”

Stephen also won the One Club award, an international advertising award based in New York, for the Durban History Museum website.

Stephen: “It was called Time Traveller. Instead of a run-of-the-mill brochure, they did it as if reading newspapers from that time talking about Durban’s history. I took those designs and re-interpreted them for the web creating a kind of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells look, with time-travel buttons and cogs.

“One thing that the internet did for me at the time, especially coming out of apartheid as an ’80s child and closed off from pop culture around the world, was that it opened up the world. The sanctions were lifted; I was getting into the online world, and having an absolute ball finding things.

“The biggest thing for me was being able to find Mad magazine on the internet. I didn’t know anybody who liked Mad magazine. Mad was printed here in South Africa, a local publication that I subscribed to and that arrived in the post every month. It would have been different if I had a group of people I could share Mad with. But to see it on the web in its raw form, it was a little bit more alive, with the artists and William Gaines on the other end of that line.

“(In 1989) the superhero edition of Mad came out and it featured P. W. Botha (shows photo on his phone and points to an image) in the middle there as 19th Century Man. I thought, ‘Great! Our prime minister is being featured in Mad magazine, that’s fantastic.’ Then you read the copy. (Young Stephen said) ‘He doesn’t have slaves. There are no slaves around here.’

“I wasn’t aware of apartheid. I knew about sanctions, that the rest of the world didn’t like us ‘for whatever reason.’

“Again that was at the height of sanctions. Even TV was censored. We did not have a lot of connection with the outside world, especially politically. Now as a twelve-year-old going into my teens, I’m reading about world politics in this cartoon magazine. I would say that I learnt the most about the world from Mad magazine right into my twenties.

“Two things that came out pretty much the same time were that edition of Mad and Lethal Weapon 2. There were these Afrikaans people talking and they were playing the bad guys. ‘Why the fuck are these guys the bad guys?’ And they were saying the K word, which I didn’t like, and they were saying it derogatorily to the black American characters. Usually it’s the Germans who are the bad guys. So when Danny Glover’s in the South African embassy saying ‘Free South Africa’ (Child Stephen thinks) ‘Why do you need to free South Africa? What’s wrong with South Africa?’ That’s when one of the first little light bulbs went off.

“I’m not a big reader. In high school a friend convinced me to read The Sword of Shannara. So I got into fantasy. I watched a lot of movies and saw The Shining and then I saw 2001 and read the book. One of the engineers I knew became a friend and he knew what I was willing to read, my sense of humour, that kind of thing.

“One of the things weirdly enough that I found daunting about science fiction vs. fantasy: fantasy I could relate to. You know, castles and wizards and mythology. Whereas I couldn’t wrap my head around pure space-opera science fiction where they’re talking about all these gadgets. I said to him (the friend), ‘They’re talking about all these phasers and plasma and engines that go at warp speed and I don’t know what they look like. Where is the dictionary that tells me what these look like?’

“He said, ‘What it looks like is not relevant. You can make it up.’ As soon he said that, he said, ‘Now you need to read some science fiction, not watch it.’

“So the friend gave me an Iain M. Banks collection of short stories ’cause he knew I was just dipping a toe. One story was so simple, just dialogue between an AI space suit and a man it’s trying to keep alive. It blew my mind that you can have short stories that are compelling. (The short story is ‘Descendant.’)

“So he then gave me The Use of Weapons. That absolutely blew my mind. The main reveal of the story happens chronologically halfway through. The editor switched it around and alternated chronology so the twist came right at the end.

“So you’re reading chapter one then you’re reading chapter thirty-eight. Iain Banks credited the editor—it was either the editor or the agent Mic Cheetham. For me that was like reading a Tarantino movie. I did not know that you were allowed to do that with a book, that you could structure a story creatively.”

In 2000, he had an idea for a novella and started writing. He dabbled in graphic novels. Then in 2006 he started writing a full-length SF novel on weekends. It was called Soul Searching.

Stephen: “The concept was everything and I wanted to finish it whether it was published or not, and I finished in 2011. That was when I realized that this is something I enjoyed doing: the art of sitting down in front of a computer and writing words was absolutely rewarding—doing research, developing a scene, thinking about where the story is going to, revisiting what you’ve written.

“I had no illusions about being a writer because I’m graphic. I hadn’t studied English literature; I hadn’t studied writing. The closest I came to writing was being around copywriters and that profession. So I started doing research on the publishing industry. I can tell you one of the worst things I read said that if you’re not in Western countries, you know, New York or UK, then you must craft your story around those audiences. This was on various blogs, South African blogs. I wouldn’t say they were the big writers but the people who write things like Ten Tips for Writers.

“I wanted to base Soul Searching in Durban. It was written in my language. A person in the UK can understand my language despite the slight colloquial touches.”

Soul Searching so far has not been published. From 2011 to 2013 there were many time-consuming near misses—from Penguin South Africa, then Random House. Each time the publishers liked the novel, asked for more, then sat on it sometimes for years.

Stephen: “Penguin came back to me in 2011. They were positive though they turned me down. Their excuse was there’s a small audience in South Africa for science fiction. For them, they had just published Deadlands by that mother-and-daughter team Lily … (Herne, actually Sarah Lotz and her mother Savannah working as a team). In 2011 they had also published a vampire novel. ‘We’re not taking any more science fiction and fantasy, so good luck.’”

Another company took years.

“These publishing people really take a long time. I’m in advertising. It takes a year to make a film. This is fucking ridiculous. The first editor had left; my emails had gone down a hole. They said they would get a reader’s report. So I thought, ‘OK, that will be great.’ Six pages of reader’s report came back, 95 percent of it glowing, then little tweaks—characters, concept, dialogue, all positive. They told me to tone down the swearing. (Chuckles). And a month later they came back again with … ‘small SF market.’ Whatever. It was exhausting, from 2011 to 2013, just a huge hole in my life.

"In 2017 I thought I'd at least managed to sell it to a small US publisher—until I started really looking closely at the terms in the contract, which were like 'We want a percentage of any sale anywhere, even when it's not our edition.’ So I said no.

“During that time I thought I needed to do something else that kept me going. I started a blog that was a science fiction story, The Journal of a DNA Pirate. I would write something every day, even just a sentence. Best format will be a journal, each day is going to be creative. So I go in there, write something. Next day go in, where did I leave off?

“There was a call from Fox & Raven publishing for up to eight thousand words. I looked at the blog and decided to submit it as is. A month or two later, they said I was in the short list. That was going to be the first thing of mine to be published. They closed their doors six months later.”

Not long after, Stephen saw the call for Imagine Africa 500, organized by Shadreck Chikoti either on Goodreads or the Short Story Day Africa groups.

Stephen: “The topic, what will Africa be like in five hundred years, was something that I felt inspired by. I’m pretty positive about Africa as a continent. I wanted to write something that encapsulates that.

“I come from a very religious household. That kind of background. I’ve always been interested in the afterlife. Soul Searching is about being able to track the soul. I wanted something that could tap into Africa spiritually, something that offered some hope, that maybe touched on where we are culturally with technology. I’m not a fan of dystopian fiction, although I watch Mad Max (smile in voice).”

Like many of the authors in the volume, Stephen was not able to go to the workshop in Malawi, and so missed out on the briefing and the mentorship after the workshop. Billy Kahora’s edits involved grammatical changes. Stephen was still desperate for some feedback.

“What Shadreck did for me, it was my first published piece. It gave me hope. I was about to give up on writing. I owe him a debt of gratitude. I made sure that I helped him with the Kindle edition of Imagine Africa. I put it on Amazon for him, did all the registration for him and everything.

“Muthi (Nhlema, author of the first story in the anthology, “One Wit’ this Place”) on Facebook Chat pinged me about the story. His story was one of the ones I really connected with. I said to him, ‘Your dialogue—I’ll go back to Iain Banks, he wrote a Scottish dialogue. He’d written it phonetically.’”

Muthi’s story “One Wit’ this Place” is written in a flavorful version of West African pidgin standing in for a future English. He also wrote the Nommo-nominated novella Ta O’Reva.

“Since Imagine Africa, I’ve been working on my next novel. What I’ve been stewing about, being adamant about is that we are allowed to write about South African culture; and fuck the Western reader, I am writing for an audience here.

“That’s what Shadreck has done for me. I am so grateful to him. Because until then I had a very limited understanding of speculative fiction from a South African perspective, having publishers saying it’s very limited here, we do one title a year. Then to have this Malawian publisher, this black publisher wanting to publish short African science fiction stories. That blew my mind.

“It also opened my eyes to have this loose group of people writing and reading this stuff, be it the Reader group (the African Science Fiction and Fantasy Reading Group) and the Society (African Speculative Fiction Society). You’re sharing tidbits, getting people saying read this, read that.

“I am playing catch-up to all this work that is out there. And we’re not even talking long-form stuff; we're talking all the short stories that I’m trying to catch up with. That there is this burgeoning industry. People wanting to publish on whatever terms. I think it’s decolonized to the nth degree, because they are willing to do it like Omenana, and give a free PDF or get a Kindle version out or the website version. It doesn’t have to be print. You’re not going through the traditional publishing route.”

His short story “Veiled” was printed in the Ake Review and is available on his website.

(Next)

I have many names. My mother calls me ‘Nwelezelanga’ because of my golden hair. Some call me ‘Mholope’ because of my fair, almost-ginger skin. One wise old woman of the tribe calls me ‘Mehlomadala’ because of my big round eyes that reflect oceans of untold stories. The village girls who like to taunt me just call me ‘that albino girl’.

— The first paragraph of Nwelezelanga, The Star Child.

Unathi Magubeni stands out. In a country where most men wear Western clothing, he walks through East London airport barefoot in a long kanga. Walking with him reminds me of being in London in 1972 and travelling with a transvestite on the tube—there was that same sense of steeling yourself against other people’s eyes.

Unathi is a working sangoma or healer/spiritual guide now based in Lusikisiki, Eastern Cape, in the former Transkei (there is a lovely Google Earth drive through Lusikisiki). His journey has taken him from the townships to Cape Town’s corporate world and then to the three-year process of becoming a sangoma.

His novella Nwelezalanga was long-listed for the then Etisalat Prize (now the 9ja Prize) for best first book by an African—a very prestigious award. It is a magical novella in three parts drawing on his experience and knowledge.

East London airport was tiny, crowded, and noisy—no interview would be possible there. We decided to go into town. But the taxis for whatever reason were eye-poppingly expensive or already reserved. So we decided to walk from the airport to catch a local. Fortunately an informal cab slowed down for us on the road and gave us an acceptable price. It started to rain.

Twenty-three years after apartheid, the city still appears to be divided racially, rundown but reasonably prosperous, though online sites show a resort town with leafy communities and sunny beaches. Through the rain under thick cloud, it was a dreary yellow-grey-green.

East London is South Africa’s only river port, though sanctions during apartheid damaged the shipping industry. German cars are made there and exported all over Africa and to Brazil.

The coelacanth, a fish that was thought to be extinct from prehistoric times, was discovered living in one of East London’s rivers.

I am reminded of Nikhil Singh’s South Africa. Dinosaurs stalk Taty Went West. Prehistoric creatures swim the rivers of Unathi’s hometown.

In the 1960s the township of Mdantsane was created for black populations, fifteen kilometres from the centre of East London. The township is the second-biggest after Soweto in Johannesburg.

The restaurant the driver found for us was large, overlooking the sea. The chairs had gold upholstery, but otherwise looked a bit rundown. For some reason, as soon as we sat down, the staff turned on the radio and sat very noisy people all around us.

This is one of the most fascinating interviews in this series and one of the hardest to transcribe. Unathi speaks with beautifully clear consonants—but in a low, gentle, and private voice. He didn’t like holding up the recorder as a microphone. The result is a clattering, music-and-laughter-filled recording that nearly drowns him out. So hearing and typing all of this was hard work, but worth it.

We establish that he is an isiXhosa speaker (though he comes from the Mpondo people). I start to ask about his book, but he at once takes control. I don’t have to ask many questions after that. Unathi has a story to tell. Or rather, many stories. To give a sense of structure, this is the only interview so far in the series to have subheadings.

Unathi: “I will say from the beginning that I was introduced to literature very late.

“Growing up, I wasn’t privy to literature. The reading I was doing was forced reading of school textbooks. I had a weird relationship with school and I didn’t read the textbooks that much either. I finished Matric without ever reading a novel. The only thing I would read was sometimes an article in a magazine, but a book for leisure, no.

“I grew up here (near East London, Eastern Cape) in Mdantsane. I went to Quleni Lower Primary, Langelitsha Higher Primary, and Qaqamba High School.

“I matriculated in 1999 and went to Cape Town to study at the Cape Technikon, now called the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. I was to study Management Technology. It was my first time being away from home so I was kind of lonely and homesick. I missed my family and my significant other; my first inspired writing was actually writing letters to them. But the family wouldn’t write back. (Laughs). It was my first experience of writing with no one telling me what to write; I was just communicating my innermost feelings.”

The poetry group and first publication

“In the second year of study, a friend invited me to a poetry session called Off the Wall at Off Moroka in the Cape Town. I think they still exist and are now based in Observatory at a venue called Touch of Madness.

“I had never been to a poetry session before the invite. I went there and when I was listening, I realized that the people were talking about things that I was mulling over. I felt so at home. I felt comfortable among the artists and the misfits. I was inspired on that first day and I went home and wrote my first poem.

“On the following Monday I went to share it and attended every poetry session. The creativity was coming through as there was a lot of stuff I wanted to talk about.

“Growing up, I had been a loner. What caused me to be a loner was I was sensing something beyond that life. My friends were not intrigued by it but it was on my mind and I thought about it a lot. Now I had an opportunity to express it through writing.

“I was the youngest member of this poetry club and I had a big support system from the older folks. The people were responding to my being earnest. Everyone would clap and that encouraged me to write more.

“During the second year of attending the poetry session, I wrote a short story when I was at home on holiday. When I told my mother and my older sister, ‘This is a short story that I wrote in the evening,’ they didn’t believe me. They read it and were more convinced that I didn’t write the story and I kept telling them, ‘I wrote this yesterday!’ (Laughs.)

“A gentleman who ran the poetry club, Hugh Hodge, said, ‘You know what? You can publish your work.’

“Because of my ignorance, I didn’t think that there was such a possibility. So we collated the poems and the short story and we self-published in 2003. The book was called Food for Thought. You can find it in the National. I was surprised to learn that it is also available at the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown.

“I printed about two hundred copies and sold them at the poetry club and they sold out. I was still a student in the second year and I thought, ‘Gee you can make money doing this. This is something I love doing and it comes naturally.’

“I asked Hugh, and he said that there was no money in writing, that people have to work in academia or have two jobs. Other people were telling me the same thing—‘Just finish your studies and go work.’”

The corporate life

“I listened and went to work for Old Mutual in 2004, an insurance company, one of the oldest and biggest ones. Their head office is in Cape Town, Pinelands. I worked in their Project Office. I was young. I was the only black person. (Laughs). My family was proud.

“The very first day I started working there, I sold my book to managers and staff. So people knew me as this writer who is coming to work there.

“But my creative writing got killed as I started to assimilate in this new world. I was now writing reports, business cases. I wasn’t writing for myself anymore. I didn’t feel whole, something was missing. I was only reading biographies of people like Richard Branson and business books from the likes of Robert Kiyosaki. I was being brainwashed into this new life. I saw myself as a corporate person. I forgot about creative writing. (Laughs). I forgot about poetry.

“Years went by. My spirit wanted freedom. I interpreted this feeling as maybe being tired after three years working for Old Mutual. So I thought being my own boss would give me this freedom my heart was yearning for. I researched entrepreneurial ventures that I could start. I managed to convince friends of mine to write down their ideas for a project we could do, develop a business case and we‘d choose one idea that was more profitable than the others and get behind it.

“One project was chosen. It wasn’t mine. It was a business in telecommunications. We kitted offices with Internet and had a suite of software and hardware office solutions. We’d started operating late 2007.

“But the anxiety I felt while I was working for Old Mutual was still there; I found refuge on a mountain. I started spending time on the mountaintop of Table Mountain in an unconscious effort to untangle the riddles in my heart.

“One time, when I was on top of the mountain, there was fog, and I couldn’t go down. So I had to sleep on the mountain. Something happened that night, I felt things I couldn’t explain; I was alive, scared, cold. My body was alive, I only managed to come down at the break of dawn the following day.

“I started having a double life of going to work then spending time on the mountain. I would go to work during the week but on Friday, I would go to the mountain and not come back until Sunday. I would sleep on the mountain purposely. I was still feeling the anxiety but I wasn’t sure what it was. I started going up the mountain every weekday after work, feeling a pull of energy I couldn’t refuse.

“In 2009 things got to a point that I was feeling unhappy and depressed, and I started to ask myself questions about the purpose I’m supposed to serve. What is it that I want to do in this life? The only thing that came naturally to me, though it came very late, was writing. I had forgotten about it. Writing! Like other people want to be doctors or pilots. I thought, I must do this thing.

“Then in October 2009 I wrote a paragraph of my first manuscript called Shades of Black. I showed a friend and said, ‘What you think?’ and she said, ‘Carry on.’ That was enough for me.”

The journey

“December 2009 comes, and the business closes (for the holidays) and I come back home as usual to East London. I was supposed to go back to Cape Town in January 2010 but when the time came, something inside said no. I couldn’t go back to Cape Town.

“I cut all my clothes and left two pairs of pants, two T-shirts, and a jacket and I was walking barefoot. My friends ran away from me. They didn’t want to spend time with me because of the change that was happening. They didn’t want to connect with me.

A continuity of tradition? Drawing from the early nineteenth century by Andrew Geddes Bain of the son of Mpondo leader.

“People thought that I was losing my marbles. I didn’t understand why people were saying this. I thought that this was just a choice. It was a process of cleansing, being reborn, just following instinct and being comfortable with not knowing what is happening.

“Relatives here were concerned. They would gossip and say that something is wrong with me. They would use words like ‘Oh shame, he had things going for him. Oh shame, oh shame.’

“I told my mother I’m not going back to Cape Town. I’m going to Transkei. My parents come from there. It was work that made them settle here. My mother comes from Lusikisiki and my father comes from Flagstaff.

“They (his family) are Mpondo people. We are not a big group as a people. Our dialect is not accommodated in the official languages of South Africa. We got absorbed by other languages in the Nguni group. Mpondo kids are taught isiXhosa at school.”

At this point, Unathi remembers something and breaks his story.

The influence of K. Sello Duiker

Unathi: “Something I left out that is very important, Geoff.

K. Sello Duiker

“In 2007 I was visiting a friend, I picked this book. It was The Quiet Violence of Dreams by K. Sello Duiker. Usually he puts the K. but it stands for his African name Kabelo.

“This is the book that inspires me, that reminds about writing. I read it three or four times. I read it, finished it, read it, finished it. I was blown away. Here’s a guy opens himself up like his heart, he walks with it; it’s on the floor how he expresses himself. It is very very wonderful. It became part of me, I said I can do something like this.

“When I started to do research about him, I found out this guy had passed on in 2005 at thirty and he had written three books. The Quiet Violence of Dreams was actually his first manuscript but it was the second one that was published first, 13 Cents. That manuscript won the Commonwealth Fiction Prize (Africa region). The third one was called Hidden Star.

“Like me—Nwelezelanga was the second manuscript I wrote, but the first one published. “

Duiker was a hard-hitting and controversial novelist. 13 Cents is about a street kid who is exploited as a rent boy, and raped as a way of controlling him. The Quiet Violence of Dreams is also about a gay sex worker.

Unathi Magubeni and Zakes Mda (Photo courtesy UM)

Unathi: “There was a lot of darkness in himself and you will understand why when you read that book. He was in an asylum. He was breaking boundaries even in the use of the language. Of all the writers I know in South Africa post 1994, Duiker was that guy holding the torch. Nobody comes close in terms of passion, in terms of letting go, in his generation. No one comes close. Zakes Mda (author of The Whale Caller) said that if he had lived Duiker would surpass him.

“But I thought since he is gone, I can take up the torch, at the very least be on a par in terms of delivery, in terms of the energy within the work. I didn’t want my work to be below this hero of mine. My intention was to take the torch from him and move it forward.”

At that point in the interview our food comes. The extent of Duiker’s influence can be seen in the opening of Nwelezelanga, which reads in part as an homage to Duiker.

Unathi picks up the thread of how he finally left the corporate life and moved to the Transkei.

Becoming a sangoma

“In 2010 I went to the former Transkei. I took a taxi to Port St Johns but then got out in the middle of nowhere, ten kilometres before reaching my destination. I just started walking and walking, along the Umzivubu River. I could feel the ocean calling me. The wild coast was alive. I slept there for two days. I had my pen and paper but I wasn’t writing anything at that time, but this movement was to help me write and finish the manuscript (Shades of Black).

“Three days later I was hungry and I needed to go back to where people were. I had seen a curio shop when I was travelling, so I thought, ‘Let me go to the shop and find work.’ I didn’t have money. Just looking around, and the lady there asked me ‘Oh, are you an artist?’

“‘Yes, I am, but not this kind of artist. I write.’

“We are talking, talking, and then she tells me she’s wanted to go to Durban to collect more curios but she has no one to mind the shop. ‘Would you mind?’ That’s how I got my first job and a place to stay. I needed that.

“I slept inside the curio store and worked for two months in the shop. The ocean was constantly calling me. One time when I went to the Oceanside, I saw a backpacker (hostel); I went in and asked for a job and they offered me one as a barman. (Laughs).

“I am meeting new people I’ve never seen before in my life, and I’m staying in people’s homes, two weeks here, three weeks there, and be a member of that family and work and then move on to another village. So I’m moving around.

“I phoned friends of mine in Cape Town, business partners, and told them that I was not coming back, I’m resigning and could they please assist me in selling the stuff in my flat? So I could settle my debts and close that chapter with Cape Town.”

The next hour was the most fascinating part of the interview. Unathi talked a lot about how meeting someone he had seen in a dream confirmed he had a vocation as a sangoma, and of the three-year process that followed. The ancestors wanted the process to involve all of his family, as a process of healing, and there were many efforts to bring his family together for it. He told a story of the moment he left Western clothing for traditional dress.

After reading the transcript, however, he wrote what he wanted to say about the process, and that text is included in After this interview, in the subheading Becoming a sangoma.

 Back to being a writer

“In 2013, it was finished. People went home and I was officially dressed as you see me now, with these beads with everything you see now. I had left this world in 2009. In 2011 I was even more secluded. I wasn’t allowed to move so I was in the homestead for nearly three years.

“In January 2014 I come back to East London. And the thing I wanted to do was write. And I thought you know, I would write about the journey of a trainee sangoma. What we call ukuthwasa. It’s about opening up, an opening up like in spring, the blossom opens. The flower was like this and now opens up. (Gestures blooming). What was within that was hiding … you were not acknowledging your full potential, the power to perceive, you know.

“So that was the process. When I come back home I started writing in January. But I had already written the paragraph, the paragraph I had written when I was a trainee sangoma.

“I was sleeping. And you know when you are sleeping and you have an urge to wake up, maybe you have a meeting at six o clock. You set your alarm for six. In your dream state you feel an urge to wake up so Wwwwhmmm (Gestures waking up) and when you look at your watch it is five to six. Oh, OK, it is already time to wake up.

“From your dream state, you are called back and you can even feel it consciously, being pulled. The same thing happened—Whhhmmm—but what was calling me was that first paragraph, for me to write it… the one that goes ‘I have many names my mother called me Nwelezelanga.’

“So Whhhmmm. The first paragraph. But I couldn’t write further because I was going on another journey on a different train altogether.

“So I didn’t continue with the paragraph until six months later in 2014. Then I wrote and finished the first chapter, and I posted it on Facebook. People paid attention to it. (Laughs). But it didn’t pay me any money. I showed it to friends and got some response, ‘Hey there’s something there.’ So I went back to Facebook and wrote a second chapter, still in 2014. And shared it with a focus group of about ten people. And people said they liked it, and then I showed them the third chapter, the last one, I felt I was I was onto something here.

“I was very thankful for this first paragraph. It was a blessing, an inspiration. With this paragraph I thought, I can go anywhere, I can go beyond the world.”

Publishing Nwelezelanga

“So I finished the same year (2014), October or November. I had to finish in the same year, I had to. Because it was forcing its way out. Wanting to get it out.

“There’s’ a gentleman call Siphiwo Mahala. He’s Head of Books and Publishing in the national Department of Arts and Culture.

“Siphiwo also a writer. He has published a novel and a short story collection. He was one person … remember when I was trying to publish Shades of Black and no one was listening, no one was giving me feedback, ‘Please just tell me what’s wrong with it?’ No one.

“In the email I would write that I was inspired by K. Sello Duiker and I would like to take the torch from him and move it forward and people would say, ‘How dare you?’

“Siphiwo said, ‘Give me the manuscript,’ and he read it and what did he do next? He flew down and met me at Hemingways (an East London hotel) to give me feedback on it. Ta ta ta … who was that bad guy? And then he edited it, like an editor would do, common sense stuff. It was huge to me, this thing that I was looking for, someone to give me feedback, he was willing to do and he wasn’t intimidated by me saying I want to take up the torch from this great writer who is reckoned the best post-1994.

Siphiwo Mahala and Unathi Magubeni (Photo courtesy of UM)

“So we finish editing. He says Shades of Black would be a breakthrough, but it got no attention in different spaces. So I said ‘I’m letting go of that one.’ But our relationship stems from that first book, the initial one.

“I showed Siphiwo one, two, three of Nwelezelanga. Then I finish in October and I give it to him again. He’s the only one who has the full manuscript of Nwelezelanga. What he does? Flies down to East London. We don’t meet at Hemingways this time, but in my suburb, a walking distance from my home, like three hundred metres. We meet at a McDonald’s there.”

At first Unathi submitted the novella to Kwela, the company who had published K. Sello Duiker. The book ended up being published by BlackBird Books, an imprint of Jacana. How BlackBird came into being is in itself an important part of South African literary history.

Unathi: “The publisher who ended up publishing it (BlackBird) is an imprint of Jacana and it publishes works by blacks. It came into being because of what Thando Mgqolozana did.

“So I sent it to the Ubantu people and then they (makes a popping sound). I don’t know if you know the story of Thando Mgqolozana and the Franschhoek Literary Festival.

“He had a go at them (the overwhelmingly white attendees). He’s doing his own festival called Ubantu Festival. He’s a groundbreaker. Many people, because of his action, have benefited because that needed to happen, but now he’s seen as a bad guy for saying the things he was saying. So this will be the first one.

“BlackBird was a response to what he did. When Thando did that—and I think there was a follow-up conversation in Joburg hosted by Jacana. And then Thabiso Mahlape, founder of BlackBird  Books, announced, ‘This is what we are going to do.’ It was a response to this oppression (of black writers). Publishers like to hide and say, ‘Publishing is subjective.’ But no! Subjective to a level that is discriminative.”

Unathi then compared the publishing industry in South Africa to the wine industry. At first the wine industry made little effort to sell to black South Africans, but then began through wine festivals in black townships, to open up new markets. For a moment, Unathi sounds like the business executive he once was. He compares publishing unfavourably to the wine industry.

Unathi: “Penetrating these spaces that the product was not associated with previously. But publishing doesn’t want to go outside the five percent of the market that they serve. “

Healing through fiction

Unathi: “There is a purpose behind this book. Before I left this world I had seen a lot of disharmony; I had seen a lot of negativity.

“If you look for example in print media, if you look at motion pictures and television, if you look at radio, disharmony is amplified. There can be an accident here and it will be on the five o’clock news, the six o’clock news. It will be amplified.

“If an individual is subjecting themselves to this eighty per cent of time—I haven’t done scientific research on this, but it’s a high percent. But if 80 percent of your input is disharmony, then the person would have disharmony inside, would have anxiety inside, would have bipolar tendencies inside. That would be their worldview, their consciousness. The whole society now is caught up in that same paradigm.

“So what I wanted to do is create a work of art that is harmonious, that is concerned with ascension energies. When a reader reads it, they feel at peace. They feel round. I wanted to create a work that is round. And I needed this work to be put on a mainstream focus for these harmony messages.

“So this book I couldn’t self-publish it; I couldn’t take a small publisher. I needed a big publisher to give me access to bookshops, to mainstream focus so that the message in the book that speaks of harmony and ascension is in that focus.

“We wanted to heal the people. Massage their heart. Make it at peace. Make it calm. Calm the waters. Show the possibilities of the spirit.

“I was invited to UCT (University of Cape Town) to speak. It was ten o’clock in the evening, to a large group of people. I had to speak there and the message was clear: As we passionately partake in the revolutionary without, we should also seek spiritual renaissance within. As we seek harmony without, we should also seek harmony within. The revolution without will crumble if the house within is unstable.

“What I do, Geoff, is I work with people. I use herbs to detoxify. For example I spent a month in Cape Town and when I came back, I steamed myself with herbs to detoxify. This feeds the mind-body balance, where you start with the body.

“Once you detoxify the body, the body’s open to receive these messages that are outside the five-sensory reality.

“In 2014 when I came out (of training) I realized that I cannot grind up enough herbs to heal all of South Africa. I cannot steam South Africa. I use them on an individual basis. At the most I work with families. When I go to a family, I cleanse the homestead, cleanse the individual within the homestead. But that is very tiring work.

“I needed to take that medicine and transform it in a way that will reach as many people as possible. This is the medicine, Geoff. So it’s no different from that thing that I grind up but it enables it to reach the many homes. Reading is an individual thing, a personal thing, a healer in the reader.”

I tell Unathi that I found Nwelezelanga to be a very tense book. From birth people want Nwelezelanga dead, and there are the Budi, people who use spiritual powers to do evil.

What is the word for witch?

Unathi: “If you look at Book Two, the midwife uses dark magic for personal gain, for ego, for self only. What we try to show in Book One is how people of light use magic—and that’s what a sangoma does—you use magic for the ascension of the community as a whole. It is not about self. The ‘I’ dies.”

I mention that Dilman Dila in the reading group asked if there was a different word for people who do harm.

“But when we talk about witches, the ‘I’ is alive, the ego is staunch. It tends to serve dark spaces because it’s all about the ‘me,’ manipulating things to serve the ‘me.’ Witch is an English word. The word in isiXhosa is Mthakathi.”

We go back to talking about the impact of the book.

Unathi: “What this book has contributed is to burst these assumptions held by people in high esteem that fiction doesn’t sell in South Africa or black people don’t read.

“This book is being read by people who don’t usually read (Laughs) but they want to read this one and they relate to it. If you look at its architecture and the way it’s told, I use the characteristics of oral storytelling. I use heightened pitch to try to hold the reader’s attention all the time; handle the reader’s heart with care, almost begging for attention; be round around the edges and put a candle at the end to give hope.”

He talks how the book has surprised many people, and a talk he gave at the Book Lounge at the Open Book festival soon after publication. The publisher talked about how it had outperformed expectation.

“My mother’s group are not readers of novels, but when my mother gave it to them they went, ‘Wow,’ and it went from the next person to the next person.”

GR: “So your mother is proud of you now.”

Unathi: “Yeah. The journey didn’t make any sense to them, even to my sisters. Up until the moment she got the book at hand. Now she sees in my feed people posting stuff, and they are going for the third reprint. It’s breaking the boundaries.”

Why African science fiction is different

We start talking about genre, and traditional science fiction with its dreams of finding other Earths to settle, and immortality. We start talking about speculative fiction in Africa.

Unathi: “Our concepts of time are different. The Western model of time tends to project into the future, far into the future.

“Our time, the moment you are born the deeper you go into time, you go backwards. As you get older, you don’t go forward with time, you are going backward. You become an elder of the tribe, a grandfather. You are not looking there, (gestures to one place) sharing the future, there as in forwards. You are there. (Gestures to a different there). That person passes on. We remember them by libations. ‘I am drinking this water in honour of this person.’ Or we do certain rituals in honour of this person. And they go further into the land of myths. (Laughs). Back, back, back.

“It seems to be that if this is new science fiction, we are looking at time differently. You’re not going to find Africans projecting themselves forward when they write their science fiction.”

Which I think is as good a statement of why African science fiction so often seems also to be looking at the past as any.

At this point I remember that I need to take photographs, one close-up, another full length. It is still hammering with rain.

Unathi’s future

Unathi: “The journey for me is a spiritual journey and the more I dig into my spiritual self, automatically I become a better writer. But writing is just one form of expression; I will express myself in other ways to serve the same purpose. The journey is calling me deeper to magic, understanding deeper the physical and psychic healing capabilities of plants and share my being with other change agents and frequency holders.”

“So even now (Laughs) the reason that I am here (visiting East London) is to take care of Cape Town. My life is not here, it is in the heartland. I’m finishing this year. I will let the book do its own thing because I’ve given it power.

“I’m done with South Africa now. (Laughs). I’ve been all over South Africa, and I don’t think there was an author in South Africa this year who was working more than me. Cape Town now for a month, I did more than twenty readings, some days I would do two.

“The voices are calling me to kneel again, kneel with the heart and go deeper to the reservoir of being.”

Having just taken his photo (and having worked in publicity myself), I voice my fear that his book and his robe and his journey could so easily be turned into a shtick, commodified for publicity. Weirdly, the restaurant starts to play American country music.

Unathi: “I need to move away from it. Johannesburg is not good for me to stay long. I can see how people react to the work, almost like praise it. And once you hear it over and over, (Laughs) you start believing it.

“There are places I still need to go to inside. I still have dark places. I still have rooms I haven’t opened. I am being put into this position where I am supposed to be this goody-goody.

“For example I disappointed someone recently. And then on the other side people are like ‘Yay, your work, yay.’ (Mimes cheering and applause). I‘m like all people, you know. I deal with ups and downs, the highs and lows, and I have to express, you know, this other side, there is a fullness.

“As I was going to the airport today, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine saying that I need to leave this, my time is finished, I can’t go beyond this year being in this. But if I am called —Africa will call—if I am called beyond the shores I will go.”

We had talked for 160 minutes. The taxi was supposed to come back after two hours, but now finally a taxi had shown up for us with a different driver.

We had to stand up and pay in a hurry. The noisy people had gone, but an older woman had been sitting at the next table for the last half hour nursing a quiet cup of tea. As we stood up, she caught my eye and gave us both the most beautiful smile and slight downward nod.

The new taxi driver beeped and waved, and when we got in, he said he knew it was us. He’d been told: a white guy with a guy in kanga. I was going back to the airport, but Unathi was getting out halfway—either to go see his family or to catch the bus back towards Transkei. We said good-bye and waved, and Unathi walked off barefoot into the rain.

As we pulled away the taxi driver asked me, “What does his wife make of him?” I think I said something like “You’d have to ask him that yourself.” As we drove on in silence, I began to realize all the reasons why the driver might have asked that question. Most of them I didn’t like.

(Next)

Blaize Kaye

I never knew my mom and dad. I remember them though. I remember the way they felt, the way they moved, across silicon and light. The way they spoke to each other. Even the way they fought.

~

I remember so clearly how my dad felt the first time he met her. The first time he lost her.

He was barely a thousand years old, still a kid, really. They’d both had their bodies back then, and genders or sex. Whichever. Either way, she was still a she, and he was still a he. It’s strange, looking back, how important biology was to us human beings then. Just a couple thousand years later my dad could barely remember what it meant to be a man. I suppose it couldn’t have meant very much at all.

“After the Reception,” published in Sub-Saharan webzine

Blaize Kaye is a philosopher, programmer, and Nommo-nominated author. His story “Ndakusuwa” (which means “I Miss You” in ChiShona) is a succinct (850 words), heartfelt story of the family separation that space travel entails. It is a nigh-perfect example of humanist SFF with an African twist.

I met Blaize on my second day in Durban, in September of 2016, a long time ago now. We had a breakfast at a nice seaside restaurant. We walked along the beachfront, which looked a bit like Miami after the apocalypse, in that its holiday attractions were deserted.

We ended up at the other end of the bay drinking all afternoon in a pier-side bar, looking at the distant impressive skyline.

It was an extremely fun day. I’ve left out of this transcript some of our shared goofball humour. I started out by telling him that he has a great name—perfect for the secret identity of the Flash.

Blaize: “I wish it was after Pascal. It was after some book called The Devil’s Advocate that my grandmother really liked. It’s about a Catholic priest who gets into a fight with the devil. I’ve never read it. There was a character called Blaise Meredith.”

I tell him I enjoyed his story “After the Reception.” It does that most difficult of things: tell a story for a posthuman future that still manages to be moving.

Blaize: “Thank you. I actually wrote that for the South African Writers Circle science fiction competition, and it won. They are a Durban-based writers’ group that Christy Zinn is part of, and I’m pretty sure that she’s the one that arranged that competition. The guy who judged the context also ran Fox and Raven Publishers before they closed down. Then I sent it to the Sub-Saharan.

“Initially I wrote the story as a wedding reception speech. It wasn’t particularly dramatic, so I changed it up. I thought it would be cool to have a post-Singularity romance story and ask the question ‘What does it mean to love somebody and get married when you’re never going to die?’ I obviously love my wife and being someone who is both an atheist and knows he’s going to die, it seemed like an interesting thing to think about it.”

I also say how much I enjoyed “Ndakusuwa,” a story published in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination (and reprinted in Strange Horizons earlier this week). Neither of us knew in 2016 that it was going to be nominated for the Nommo Award. I comment on how often he humanizes his science by writing about family relationships.

Blaize: “For sure. One of my writing goals (chuckles) this year in big bold is do not write about families again. Just pick something else. But I am very interested in families. The drama is small scale but it means so much to us. I read a lot of literary fiction as well—I’m kind of used to that as well.

“I didn’t read any genre fiction for a big chunk of my twenties. Some of the work that’s been done particularly by women science fiction writers is what drew me back in completely. Asian American writers like Ken Liu; I love his stuff. And Isabel Yap, Alice Sola Kim, all of these people are brilliant.

“In genre fiction, I’ve always been much more enthusiastic about short stories rather than novels whether as a reader or a writer. I can’t quite say why. It might be that I have a short span of attention. It may be my liking for writers like Raymond Carver. I like being able to hold the whole thing in my head at once and just kind of see it all working. You get that kind of gestalt.”

Talking to Blaize was perhaps in some ways too much like talking to myself. Way too much in common, many of the same reference points. As we go over his early reading, it’s a bit like looking in a mirror—Lord of the Rings, The Silmarilion, It by Stephen King, Dune, Rendezvous with Rama, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or John Gardiner’s Grendel. He even loves McSweeney’s regular compilations of literature in odd-shaped boxes.

His daughter makes him play a clip from the old Hulk cartoon where he fights Ghost Rider.

Blaize: “She makes me play it every morning. ‘Daddy, I want to see Ghost Rider against the Hulk,’ and my wife is just giving me the eye, because there is this fiery skull and this big green guy beating each other up.

“I am a Marvel fan insofar as I enjoy comics. My dad used to read Creepy and Eerie when he was young. The whole family loved comics; they loved Conan. Those were my bedtime stories. He would tell me about The X-Men. Cyclops, he would explain the whole origins story. Some of the comics that he read were like comic versions of novels. It’s happened a couple of times now I’m reading a novel and I’ll be like ‘I know this story’ and it turns out Dad retold me the comics version. Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man. That happened with Fahrenheit 451 as well.

“I always found it quite difficult to get comics here. You could get a few Superman. There were always Archie comics. By the way, I’m impressed by the recent Archie comics.

“In Joburg where I grew up there were two, three, or four places where you might be able to find some things but for the most part, the bookshops at least where I lived were always for nonfiction.

“There’s this one Borges story where he goes into a far future and he meets this guy in the desert, and he says that back home he’s got thousands of books. And the guy says, ‘No no, you can only really read one or two books in an entire lifetime.’ I always thought that that was kind of right.

“The perfect fantasy book for me was Jo Walton’s Among Others. I loved, loved, loved that book. The connection to Lord of the Rings there is pretty deep. That book is more or less the scouring of the Shire. She says that. That’s the kind of fantasy I enjoy now.

“The first science fiction I ever read was probably The Hobbit. I remember reading that, I think, in Mauritius actually. My aunt and uncle are a lot richer than the rest of our family. They literally struck oil. They were just cruising around the world and they invited everybody out there.

“There’s a lot of like really interesting stuff, like the SF scene in Russia, I’ve read Victor Pelevin who’s awesome. It’s nice to see stuff that’s completely different that doesn’t feel familiar and still works. That was one of the cool things when anime started coming across. The thing I always liked about anime is they could let stuff hang. I had a book of Japanese fairy tales growing up. There was a weird logic to these things that you find in Zen koans as well.”

One of the things Blaize does not mention during the interview is that he studied Zen at Chan Lin, the meditation centre at Nan Hua Temple, Bronkhorstspruit. One of his stories, “Return to the Source,” was Zen-influenced and was published in ZeStatic.

Blaize is a working philosopher and computer programmer.

Blaize: “I’m a programmer. Which isn’t the stretch that you’d imagine. The philosophy I already like is logic and the kind of automation of reason. They all sort of mesh together. And it pays the bills as well. I’m lucky that I get to do something I really love. The programmes I write are for e-commerce websites and suchlike.

“My interest in fiction is quite divorced from the more techy part of me. Richard Rorty talks about two kinds of philosophers, one being the techy and one being the fuzzy. There’s part of me that really likes computers and stuff, and another part that really likes self-making. That comes up a lot in what I try to do: the creation of the self. It’s the notion that the ‘I’ is given but comes out of reading and writing and chatting to people. I’m anti-Cartesian through and through.”

Blaize and I also share an interest in the neurophilosopher Daniel Dennett.

Blaize: ”I met Dennett. There’s a long history between my philosophy department and Dennett.

“My supervisor David Spurett actually brought him out here and worked with him on certain things. His philosophy is very much the kind of philosophy we do at University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. We’re the only place in South Africa that does cognitive science, which is the reason I moved down to Durban in the first place—to work with David Spurett in his department. We take science seriously; we do a lot of experiments. I’ve done a lot of work in experimental philosophy. My master’s was in cognitive science, not philosophy proper. Where I did my research on Tetris.

“My idea was basically, there’s been all these studies that show there’s a causative link between certain cognitive skills like mentally orienting things. We use our mental rotation for a bunch of things, one of them being navigation. There’s also a general IQ bump you get from doing these kinds of tasks. Give me a version of Tetris where I couldn’t rotate the zoids. Would that over time help improve people’s mental rotation performance?

“Let’s just say, it didn’t. (Chuckles) But what it did do is get me a degree.

“I don’t do a lot of gaming. I used to, but I got bored with first-person shooters.

“I find the same thing in television these days. Everybody’s speaking about The Walking Dead episode where the main character smashes someone’s head in. I just can’t watch that kind of thing. After I started reading history, about Rwanda, about World War Two, I realized that there’s so much cruelty that I don’t want to spend my time on it.”

We haven’t yet spoke about his most high-profile sale—“Revision Theory” in Nature.

Time to take stock.

Themba reread what he'd written.

“I must know if this will work. It's 11:35 p.m., 12 Sept. 2015. I'm in the garage. In 2 minutes, I'm going to open the third drawer down on the left side of my workbench.”

That was it.

There were two possibilities.

One: the drawer would remain as empty as it had been since the day he'd bought the bench. That wouldn't necessarily mean that the device didn't work, but it would be disappointing.

Two: the drawer would no longer be empty.

He folded the note carefully and focused on what he intended to do with it. He would place it in a white envelope, address it to himself, and deposit it in the red and blue postbox next to the notice board at the supermarket.

He waited.

11:37:59 p.m.

 Themba opened the drawer. Inside lay a yellowed envelope.

He trembled as he retrieved the letter and opened it. There, written in a faded blue script he didn't recognize, was a simple response:

“Yes, it works.”

“Revision Theory” is another succinct parable. A father working on time travel leaves a letter for his young daughter to open in the future asking her to send a note back in time. He keeps altering his letter in response to her reply. Each time her letter changes too. We notice, but he can’t as his whole history has changed.

Blaize: “I’m not sure what I feel about time travel beyond making it a way of exploring the personal dimension or a story, rather than taking it seriously as a scientific possibility. That story in particular was more about how we can never get away from who we are. We don’t make the decisions we should make, even though we know we’re supposed to.

“There was a little blog attached to that Nature, ‘Future Conditional,’ where I speak about the relationship that has to addiction. Probably the major issue that we have generally is that we know what we’re supposed to do, but go against our own best interests. This comes up in addiction; it comes up pretty much everywhere. And Themba? The main character really knows that he should spend time with his family. And yet he doesn’t.

“I wrote that blog because I was working really hard and I could hear my daughter and my wife in the other room, and I was saying to myself, ‘I should probably be hanging out with them than spending time on the stupid project.’ And instead of doing it, I sat and wrote the story. That was basically Themba at the end of the story.

 “It was odd selling to Nature. I sent that story into a token market, Everyday Fiction. They pay like five dollars a story. Their servers crashed and they lost my submission, so I though ‘Ach! Don’t self-reject. Try to send it somewhere big.’ It was sixty days later that Colin from Nature wrote back, ‘I really love the story. I’d love to print it.’

“It was really cool because I have a lot of scientist friends at varsity and they were all pretty jealous that I was in Nature. I said to my supervisor, ‘I got a story in Nature.’ He was like ‘Holy shit!’ So yeah, it was a good sale. They did a podcast of it, so it was voice acted, very funny to hear. I’m super happy about it.”

We talk a bit about why I don’t think time travel by humans is possible.

Blaize: “It reminds me of one of Dennett’s things. He’s got this thing called real patterns. He calls it the theory of semi-realism. That may be of interest to you. Just an aside. Dennett is one of these characters who trots out the same ideas in every book. We see him taking science seriously, like his heroes ... Quine? and the pragmatists, but it’s the same idea all the way through. We have no self, the self is not so much a construct, it’s real but it’s not real.

“He’s a giant. The thing I like about Dennett—and what I dislike about a lot of philosophy—Dennett, by taking science seriously, by working with roboticists, with neuroscientists, with psychologists, his work actually makes a difference? What he does matters. He shows us that freedom evolves. Look, we can have determinism and still have a kind of free world. That seems to me to be a brilliant insight and a very important project at least. Because it makes a difference to law, how we conceive of ourselves. Some of the stuff really technical guys do never touches the world. Like higher mathematics, just less interesting.”

I ask him what’s he writing now.

“I see myself right now in the apprenticeship stage. I was trying to get into a writing workshop and I need a portfolio of ten short stories to apply. What I thought was: what if I sent them a portfolio of ten stories that have actually sold.

“I’m now on story sale number nine, the one for Short Story Day Africa. Though that isn’t a sale but it kind of counts, because it will appear in an anthology.

“I submitted to that and last month they released the long list and my story’s on that long list. What’s cool at Short Story Day Africa is that they are actively looking for SFy stuff.” (Read the Rachel Zadok interview about SSDA and their SF anthology Terra Incognita.)

Since this interview the story has indeed been published in the SSDA anthology Migrations, which has eight speculative stories. Blaize’s story “Diaspora Electronica” went on to make the shortlist of five stories for the SSDA Award.

Other speculative stories in the anthology had major impact. Sibongile Fishers “A Door Ajar” won the overall SSDA Award and was nominated for a Nommo. Also Stacey Hardy’s “Involution” was nominated for the Caine Prize.

I ask the South Africa questions. Why nobody from the townships? Why do people live behind barbed wire?

Blaize: “It’s a long-running thing in our history, this kind of tension. Even in Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, there’s parts of that you could take out and plonk right in a newspaper now, and it’d be exactly the same thing.“

At this point as sometimes happened—the recorder paused. The notes I was typing as Blaize spoke show that this was perhaps the most personal part of the interview for Blaize and it’s lost. The notes tell me that he “didn’t like talking about South Africa,” I think, because he’s not sure that his family have deep roots there. My notes say that he felt only a vague relation to the suburbs rather than to South Africa and that he may have “more in common with a middle-class white American.” His grandfather may have been adopted and he feels closer in many ways to his wife’s Afrikaans family—though as a child he got beaten up in school for being a “rooinek,” an English boy. He spoke of all the hate he found in that environment. He spoke of ”his shock at uni” or realizing how deeply racist lower- to middle-class culture is.

Fortunately I noticed that we’d stopped recording, and normal service was resumed.

Blaize: “There was a big to-do about this woman called Penny Sparrow who posted something on Facebook that spoke about all these people on the beaches as monkeys. That is typical South African white racism right there. She got called out on social media; it became a massive thing; there were some brilliant articles written about it.

“As somebody who tries to take this stuff seriously, I learned a lot from that. Under apartheid, the beaches were, like most things, segregated. The pieces I read at the time focused on what it meant to be able to reclaim public spaces.

“I don’t think anybody believes they are racists but there are signs and these traces of it in everything that we do. Our entire culture is set up like that. Which … which sucks. But it is like that.”

I talk about how much of what I’ve heard in SA is like what white people were saying in the USA in the 1960s, exactly what people were saying about black ghettos.

Blaize: “The other thing I get quite often is that ‘they hate us just as much,’ which is meant to somehow justify the stuff we say or think. These images that people hold onto.

“There’s a really interesting book, The Colonizer and the Colonized by Albert Memmi, a Tunisian philosopher and thinker. (You can see a YouTube discussion of Memmi from an Islamic perspective here, by Mohamed Ghilan.)

“I was really quite lucky, I did my undergraduate degree by correspondence at the University of South Africa, UNISA. The huge beautiful building in Pretoria. They have probably the best African philosophy programme in the country hands down. I wasn’t there to study African philosophy; I was there to study philosophy of mind. But I read a lot of stuff that just changed my perspective and was very healthy for a middle-class white person coming out of the south of Joburg where we just don’t learn about this stuff.

“I read Fanon, and lots of post-liberation stuff. One of the people we studied was Kwame Nkrumah, his Consciencism. (You can read a Marxist manual for understanding the philosophy from this link.) Which is OK, his biography and the stuff he did as a politician were probably better than his philosophy.

“One of the major figures is Mogobe Ramose and his work African Philosophy through Ubuntu. He ran the philosophy department while I was there and his work was on Ubuntu. It’s a kind of ethical principle. ‘We are because of others.’ It pops up all over the place. There’s even a Linux distribution called Ubuntu. He did almost like a continental phenomenological analysis of that.

“Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull, which is a book about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, shocked the shit out of me because suddenly I was aware of our history and the brutality of it. No Future without Forgiveness by Desmond Tutu was another book we read. There was enough of a smack across the head intellectually, that I could see what was wrong. Growing up in the suburbs, we never, like never, met the other South African cultures.

“That was really good about UNISA, I got introduced to a bunch of really interesting stuff that gave me the tools—I don’t want at all to suggest that I’ve escaped from my history—but it gave me the tools to step back a little bit and analyse critically where I was coming from. Something I read on Twitter from some American person, ‘We’re all recovering racists.’ That felt quite true to me. We are thrown into the world. We absorb all of this stuff from our culture, all this hate and ways of relating to people.

“For me literature and philosophy has given me a way of just stepping a little bit outside of that.”

You can read a full summary of Blaize’s work so far at Twittering Machines on bomoko.

(Next)

I went to see Durban because Nikhil Singh had told me that the phantasmagoria of his novel Taty Went West had its roots in the city. In that novel The Zone is a place of decaying hotels, prostitutes, gritty docks, and seaside piers on which sangomas (who are literally panthers) live.

Contrast: wall of an arts centre next to Durban harbour

It’s a resort town whose prosperity was in part based on sanctions—South Africans couldn’t travel so they went to the seaside in Durban. Now it’s a strange mix of decaying luxury, a harbour, a city of arts, a university town, a colonial capital, and a market town for a huge agricultural surround.

Flying into the airport, I saw at once what I had been missing in Cape Town: green. Durban had been a centre of sugarcane production, and all along the coast there were still farms and swathes of greenery.

It was pouring with rain—something else I didn’t see in Cape Town.

After our interview, Stephen Embleton drove me through a storm around the sites of Durban. In the rain, old colonial Durban was full of haunted palaces.

I think I saw two different harbours, one at the north end of the bay and one further south. This is the north, by a harbour-front arts centre.

Stephen took me on a tour of this arts centre. It was full of sculpture, lively signage, portraiture.

Everywhere, there were signs that Durban had seen better days. Right on the seafront, some of the older skyscrapers looked crammed in, lopsided, one with broken windows and needing paint. Whole buildings were up for auction.

Auction: Prime residential block

The next day, Blaize Kaye and I walked along the seafront. The weather was better, but the impression of a beach resort without tourists was strong.

It was full of the eccentricities of faded amusements. A cable car still rattled overhead—and deposited people in a concrete waterfront Wild West recreation.

At one end of our walk, a stranded tanker turned into attraction.

In the first South Africa chapter, I described an incident when I was staying with a black writer in Durban. I walked into my host’s kitchen with groceries for dinner. Seeing a white man invading her kitchen, she backed away in evident terror. My bedroom had a panic button. South Africa is full of fear and tension. On balance, I didn’t enjoy my stay there.

I did, however, meet some lovely people.

(Next)

The West has history all right—great volumes of the stuff full of dates, and dynasties, revolutions, conquests, genocides, technological breakthroughs, and political movements. Almost by definition history is written, and if it’s not we have to add the word “oral.”

But in a funny way, what we in the West lack is a past—at least what Dilman Dila or Unathi Magubeni mean by a past, one that you can taste or feel in your bones, a past that you still inhabit.

There was recently a kerfuffle over supposed ageism at a major US convention. Older writers like myself were kind of asked to accept that we might not be needed on panels (which didn’t seem to me to be unreasonable). The partner of one of those involved was said to have written, “the past is evil.”

I have no idea if that phrase was actually written—it was a Facebook argument. But the phrase does sum up one extreme end of a tendency that sees the past as something to move beyond. The past is wrong, bad, misinformed, superstitious, unadvanced. It is something in ourselves to be worked through and overcome.

Alongside history, there is the Future, with travel to the stars and brain downloads. Embedded in that somewhere is an unscientific faith in science, and which in its unexamined heart regards scientific results as being truer than other kinds of knowledge.

It seems to me that Afrofuturism has recently been redefined to be both more African, and as something that has its roots in the past.

As Nnedi Okorafor says in her TED Talk, “African science fiction’s blood runs deep and it’s old and it’s ready to come forth.”

--

In chapter twelve: two writers who live in Grahamstown: Samuel Kolawole and Stacy Hardy.

Abuja was built to be a city of the future. It is Afrofuturism solidified as roads, an international airport, planned parks, and ministerial buildings.

Abuja was my first African city, my first taste of Africa. In 2009, it was eighteen years old, a new capital city built between the Muslim north and Christian south.

It is one of the dullest places I have ever been.

You know how some people, if you do anything out of the ordinary, try to scare you out of it?

It had happened before I first visited Cambodia (“They’ll kill you.”), and before I first visited Brasil (“They’ll rob you, you’ll be found wandering naked”). So I was well prepared when they started up on Nigeria. “It was so dangerous, I had to go around with an armed guard the whole time.” Apparently I was going to be robbed, kidnapped, hounded for bribes, and tricked by fraudsters.

Imagine if you can the disappointment of finding myself in a place that was as safe and quiet as a suburb of, say, Topeka, Kansas.

I had hoped for some live music. I could find none. I think in 2009 there was only one movie house, and I never found it.

In 2009, the most exciting thing was changing my money. The street leading up to the Sheraton (where I did NOT stay—it charged what it would charge in the USA) was lined with very elegant Muslim men sitting under umbrellas with what looked like tens of thousands of dollars' worth of currency on outdoor tables.

Photo courtesy of Abuja Sheraton. Rooms at US$ 238.00 a night

My cards didn’t work in Nigeria and I was going to Makurdi where they were going to work even less, so I changed several hundred pounds on the street. I ended up with a huge roll of worn naira bills that wouldn’t fit into either wallet or hidden pouch.

Don’t do what I did. A taxi pulled up right by the money changer’s table. I nearly got into it—the money changer grabbed hold of my arm and stopped me.

Even in 2009, prices in middle-class shopping malls reached my pain threshold. I tried to buy a new belt and stopped when the asking price was one hundred bucks. And it was a shop not a market stall, so there was no negotiation.

There were lovely cake shops and ice cream parlours, good restaurants, fashion boutiques, and a small art gallery. In the park at night they served tasty roast fish. Abuja is city of long car voyages, carefully preserved ravines full of trees, distant rocks that look like something landed from the moon, and government buildings. A city of parks and walls.

Condos and trees and walls

Everywhere there are modern, sometimes ginormous buildings. Especially breathtaking are the hugely out-of-scale National Church and National Mosque. They stand near each other as if reflected in a distorting mirror.

The National Church.  Note size of cars for comparison.

Every year I visited, the traffic got worse. The road from the distant airport, especially, always seemed to be being upgraded. Every year more people crowd into the surrounds of Abuja, many of them along the airport road. They create a vast hinterland of sprawl and traffic.

My worst experience with Abuja traffic was in 2015. I got up at 4.30 am to get to the bus park for Jalingo in Taraba State.

I hate bus parks. They seem to be semi-informal and to move every year. I need a friend to get me there—and to find the right beat-up van that will go to my destination. So we set out very early to make a 7.00 am bus and missed it.

At about six am the taxi drove onto a local roundabout and we stopped dead. Nothing moved in or out of it for about an hour.

When we finally got onto a Jalingo bus, it was around ten am and we had a trip across Nigeria ahead of us. The traffic on those suburban roads was still unmoving.

Life makes Nigerians resourceful. The bus driver didn’t drive on the roads at all. Instead he wound through linked parking lots or bounced onto unpaved tracks in back of the shops or houses.

But my most thrilling ride was in 2011 when I bussed back from Jalingo. My friend Victor negotiated a great price, and I got in the front seat—usually the most comfortable. It was not until we started pulling away that I realized there was no sliding door on my side of the vehicle. It had been torn off in an accident.

We drove at eighty miles per hour swerving around potholes without seatbelts or doors. At one point a fuel truck avoided a pothole by heading direct for us on the wrong side of the road. We had to drive onto the track to miss him.

Fortunately a very handsome, muscular army man was sitting between me and the driver. I linked arms with Muscles and held on. By the time we reached Abuja late at night, I was ready to propose marriage.

The flats I’ve visited in this new city are modern, clean, small, well appointed with full kitchens and bathrooms—even when there may not be any running water.

I briefly considered buying something in Abuja. The property prices stopped me dead. I checked prices for this article in June 2018. I saw a four-bedroom duplex RENTING for roughly thirty thousand pounds a year. A two-bedroom flat in Wuse was selling for a more reasonable fifty to fifty-five thousand pounds. Cheap for London—but remember, mortgages work differently in Nigeria and most people have to buy outright.

A scene outside my hotel in Abuja.

So, here I was with Chinelo and Odafe in Abuja again. I found yet another clean, modest hotel for thirty bucks a night, and we all met up our first night to go to an Abuja I did not know—an Ethiopian restaurant in Maitama amusement park.

Sadly, Maitama looked rather run-down and closed, at least for the night—so was our restaurant. We wandered in the warm night past darkened attractions and one box full of light, a barbershop that was open. A young man ran out and intercepted us. “You were at the Ake Festival!” He recognized Chinelo and Odafe, from the panels. He was of course a writer. I sometimes think there are more writers in Nigeria than there are dentists—or readers.

Abubakr Adam Ibrahim, a mainstream writer Chinelo Onwualu introduced me to in 2015 and the winner of the hugely lucrative Nigeria Prize for Literature, worked for years on a national newspaper in Abuja. I get the impression many more potential writers work in Abuja’s government and media jobs, drive its many ring roads, or think of it as a vision of the future that is very far from having gone wrong.

(Next)

Photo courtesy Chinelo Onwualu

Abiye hated coming to the Galleria. She preferred to shop on the island, but she could never find any appropriate games for her students there. The Immersive Reality stuff that the island kids liked would not work in her classroom, where access to the grid was spotty at best. And none of her kids had the implants or body mods that would even make those games work. Alas, the Galleria it was.

It being a Saturday, the space was crowded with teenagers showing off their latest body paint outfits, AIs herding tired and unhappy children, and couples high on pheromone stimulants. The touts were also out in full force eager to hustle you the cheaper, less legal version of whatever you were looking for.

The woman looked like a tout: Euro-African with scruffy shoulder-length blonde hair, she wore their baggy, fear-ground trousers and faded t-shirt, but she was doing a poor job of it. Rather than calling out to passersby, grabbing likely customers to shout quick descriptions of her wares, then briskly moving on if they showed no interest, she seemed to be waiting for something.

“Madam, wetin you dey find?” the woman called out when she caught sight of Abiye.

Normally Abiye would have looked away and hurried on. Buying knock-offs was a serious criminal offence. You could go to prison, or worse, destroy your credit score. However, she had been wandering around the mall for the last few hours with little luck, and she was intrigued by the woman’s crooked smile.

“What are you selling?” Abiye stopped to ask.

“Ah, madam, you go like am. E go sweet you well, well.”

“Yes, but what is it?”

“No o I no fit talk am anyhow like that, now,” the woman said cajolingly. “Make you follow me, I go show you.”

Abiye scoffed at that. Did this woman think she was a fresh-come mugu? Follow her, so that her crew could roll her and clear all her cred once they were in the bowels of the building.

“Abeg, it’s ok. Forget,” Abiye said and turned to move off.

‘Wait, wait, no be like that. Na obonge thing I wan show you… Madam, abeg, see the thing for here,” she said. Abiye had never seen a paper pamphlet before. Even her school in the eco-slum of Agoro had switched to digital years ago. The novelty of it alone stopped her and she read the title of the tract: THE WISH BOX.

— From "The Wish Box," Imagine Africa 500.

Chinelo Onwualu is one of the indispensable figures in the history of the rise of modern African SFF. As a writer she was there, or nearly there, from the beginning. As the fiction editor and co-founder of Omenana (along with Mazi Chiagozie Nwonwu, interviewed in Part 10) she has already shaped the writing of a generation, and continues to be one of the still points around which the entire field revolves.

She has a real talent for improvising long, grammatically perfect sentences, though sometimes the talking trails off into reflection. Her accent is rather North American, I think from a childhood spent following her parents who worked abroad.  I ask her which story she wants to quote in the opening, and that gets us talking about her own writing.

Chinelo: “It’s interesting because I think my stories are rather lightweight. I think the story that speaks most is the one in Imagine Africa 500, ‘The Wish Box.’ I really like that story in terms of its impact.

“There’s magic in it. The wish box itself is a mysterious McGuffin. We don’t know its origins. We don’t know why it does what it does. It’s something I made up entirely. It was an object I saw in a dream. I have a tendency to dream in narrative, which here is not common. It’s unusual. My dreams tell stories and sometimes I’m lucky enough to see it end. Sometimes I get flashbacks. Sometimes I wake up and go back into the dream, into a different part of it.

“‘The Wish Box’ is about poverty and how being well meaning is not enough. Just having a desire to do good is not enough to diminish structural inequalities.

“We live in a society (Nigeria) that is one of the most unequal in the world. The rich are incredibly rich and the poor are incredibly poor. As a person you sometimes have a desire … (breaks for thought) ‘OK … if I could just give alms to the poor or pay the school fees for just one family or donate to charity, then I’m sure everything would work out.’ When what needs to change is the way society actually works.

“You have to be willing to accept that you may lose your position of privilege should things change. Without willingness to give up your own privilege there’s a chance that all your good intention is just that. It might even backfire and make things worse.

“The story itself came out of a dream, but it also intersected with something I’ve been struggling with, living in Nigerian society and trying to figure out how I can make things better for the world. I think I’ve come to the conclusion that the best I can do is make sure that those around me, those with whom I am in contact, are at the very least not being exploited.”

We talk about the difficulties of ensuring diversity is represented.

“A good example is Ivor Hartmann’s AfroSFV2, which I still have real problems with. It is illustrative of what happens when you don’t examine your own place in the structure. When you do something without looking.”

All the contributors to AfroSFV2 were male.

“Someone in the diaspora complains that an anthology printed in Nigeria is full of really bad stories. While the fact is that most of us here don’t have access to educational resources that someone in the diaspora does.

“So when you’re talking about empirical quality or you’re talking about grammar, sentence structure, and the like, you’re not going to get the same kind of quality here as you do over there.

“But when publishers see that, publishers are more likely to want to publish people in the diaspora, A, because there is a certain empirical quality that they are dealing with but, also B, because people in the diaspora are spending more time talking about engagement with the West than we are.

“This is starting to make this an Us-versus-Them thing, but the truth is Western readers want to see themselves in works of African fiction. Which is why we see one thousand—I don’t know how many—versions of the dispossessed, displaced immigrant longing for home. So much more than we see stories about people who are here and just living their lives.”

We start to talk about the importance of languages—styles of English certainly—but also use of or roots in African languages.

Chinelo: “Language has its own role to play, but I think we should also acknowledge the reality that we live in which is: that for all of us to read each other’s work, we do have to read in a particular language and that language is increasingly becoming English or French. The reality is that those are the colonial languages.

“I’m sure there will be a backlash. Things come and go, right? There will be people who say, ‘No, I’m not writing or reading in colonial languages,’ and that’s great for them. But the fact of the matter is that the number of people who can speak and read and write in a language like Igbo is fast declining. And that is one of the big ones in Nigeria. We have to acknowledge it.

“I would love to see more translations of things. I would like to see things that have different rhythms. I love that absolutely. I just have to understand that I have to be able to set aside prejudices and my understandings of the way things are written to see, to acknowledge, and appreciate that. But the fact is that English is the language that binds … how many of these different countries together? We wouldn’t be able to have these conversations or engagements with each other if we didn’t speak the language. As noble as what Ngũgĩ (wa Thiong’o, focus of the Jalada Language Project and author of Decolonialising the Mind) is doing is, he is still swimming a little bit upstream on this.”

Stories by Chinelo were in Mothership, AfroSF, Terra Incognita, and Imagine Africa 500. At each step of the progress, she showed up. She just missed being in Lagos_2060. Only Dilman Dila has been a more continual authorial presence in African SFF. Her mainstream stories have been published in Kalahari Review and Saraba.

Chinelo: “That was right at the beginning. I did have a period where I really struggled with what I should write. I love speculative fiction. My ears perk up if I hear, ‘It’s a story of a women who’s lost her husband and she’s struggling with grief.’ Yeah, OK, that’s great. ‘But she’s also slipping in and out of time.’ (Mimes delight) … Oh really? Once you throw in a speculative element, I get interested.

“To be honest I was a bit opportunistic about it. When I decided to focus on writing speculative fiction, I started looking for places that were looking for African writers. I was very disappointed not to get into Lagos_2060 because I didn’t hear about it in time.  

“My policy has been whenever I hear that someone wants specifically African writing, specifically spec fic, I’m there with my hat on. It’s one of the reasons why I agreed to let Ivor have that story (‘The Gift of Touch’) because I really wanted to be in that collection (the first AfroSF). It’s actually been quite deliberate. For me to say ‘Oh, it was a happy accident in every one of these cases’ would be a lie.

“I was submitting and I was lucky that people thought it was good enough to publish. I’ve tried to be conscious about representation, making sure that if there is a woman’s voice to be heard that I’m at least there to help represent.

“There is only one way to do it. You do have to be deliberate about it. You can’t sit around and hope that someone will discover you. You have to send in your stuff and keep working on your stuff until it’s good enough to publish. It’s the only way I can think of.

“I struggle very much with ‘Ah, Africans don’t do speculative fiction.’

“The kind of speculative fiction that people are looking for from Africans is the kind that has Juju in it or a shrine and a priestess. And it has to be closely tied to traditional beliefs.

“Or it’s a kind of sword-and-soul fantasy like Milton Davis is doing or Charles R. Saunders. As wonderful as those are, they are not that much different from Tolkien. Their foundation text just happens to be a different continent. They mythologize the continent in a way that when I look at it, I can’t recognise. People are still behaving in very American ways.

“When I first started out, I did have these stories that I actually had to go through and edit out the speculative element. The story I wrote for Kalahari, the original idea was that there is this woman who has found herself slipping in and out of reality for years.

“I based that on a real thing I’d heard, that a woman woke up and believed she was a twelve-year-old from seventh-century France and had a lot of problems because of it. I wrote that story and thought ‘OK, no one’s going want to publish this,’ so I went back in and I stripped it of all the spec elements, and wrote it from a different character’s point of view and truncated the ending so we wouldn’t get to the speculative parts. And it sold. To Kalahari. And I was like, ‘Eh.’ I always felt it was missing something. It was very stately and literary. The Saraba story was basically an essay that I fictionalized.

“So the conscious decision to write spec fic from an African point of view came to me oddly enough with Clarion. I only applied to Clarion because my story got into Mothership.

“I’ve always admired Nnedi Okorafor’s work. For a long time … I still kind of want to be her (Laughs) and live her life. Because she is doing something pretty extraordinary as an African woman. But she’s also doing it from the perspective of someone in the diaspora. Having lived in diaspora, I know how isolating and out of touch it can make you very, very quickly with what is happening on the ground in cities, in neighbourhoods.

“Not to say that my life is somehow … that I am a woman of the people or something. But when I go out in a taxi, I listen to people speaking pidgin, and I know that pidgin has shifted in the last ten years.

“When I read Tade Thompson’s Making Wolf, one of the things that struck me even though it was a fictionalized Nigeria, it was a Nigeria that was stuck in the 1990s, a Nigeria under (dictator Sani) Abacha. This was a Nigeria still under military rule. It’s nothing like it is today. I think Tade recognizes this to some extent, but that’s what happens when you live in the diaspora. In some way you start to drift from things that moor you to a culture.

“I love Nnedi, but her … but her book Lagoon is problematic for me precisely because having visited Lagos quite a bit and having lived there at one point in my life, I did not recognize Lagos in that book. I spoke to some other people who have lived in Lagos and many of them, they say the same. It’s a very good book; it’s excellently written, it’s a beautiful story. It just isn’t a Lagos book; it’s not a Lagos story. The Nigerian spaces she writes about have a clinical, detached quality to them that for me speaks to the fact that she doesn’t live in these places. She doesn’t spend living, breathing time in these spaces and that can sometimes rob you of vitality. Which is why I prefer her books like Zarah the Windseeker, which I loved, because it exists in this fantasy space but still has recognizably African elements. I think Who Fears Death is the same way.

“It’s hard being the lone voice, being the only person saying these things. I have to be careful because she gets a lot of backlash from African writers who say, ‘You’re not authentic enough to be writing this.’ She’s already getting that. Just because I have problems with some of her work doesn’t mean I don’t admire her greatly, because I do. But I also don’t want to add to the chorus of unwarranted criticism that she faces.”

I ask about what she’s writing now.

Chinelo: “The novel I’m working on now was based on a dream. I have a series of things I want to work on in the future and a lot of them are based on dreams.  

“In the way you know something living in the moment, you know your past, you have the backstory in your dream. Dreams are full of symbolism. I think that’s why the short story framework seems to work better for me. ’Cause I’m writing the novel and I’m having a bit of a hard time generating enough words for it and keeping it going sometimes.

“Whereas I can work with stories because they are short to the point, they encapsulate the story I’m trying to tell. I have trouble enough with my endings. (Laughs) When you’re writing a novel, you’re writing to scale and the scale is so much larger.

“I think like a reporter. For me … words are precious and the more ideas you can cram into as few words as possible, the better. (Laughs). So … writing these long sprawling narratives, I’m having a hard time doing that. I want to see if I can write a good YA novel and work my way up into more lengthy narratives. Right now I’m at the beginning of my career.

“I am an editor. I enjoy revising. I have much more fun writing when there is stuff to play with.

“In my writing career I’ve had to be very deliberate and say this is what I want to do, this is the niche I want to occupy. There are ten thousand other people doing this other thing.

“It’s the same with editing. There are tons of people who are writing out there, especially in Nigeria. Everybody you meet. They have written a novel; they have written a collection of short stories that they’ve self-published. But nobody was saying let me publish some stories or let me primarily edit. It’s about seeking out spaces where expertise is needed and trying to see if I can provide it.

“Frankly I enjoy writing spec fiction. I enjoy writing it, I enjoy reading it. I do have a literary bent to my tastes, but only because I love a well constructed sentence. But more than anything I love a good story. And spec fic tends to be heavier on plot than other genres and I really like that. There’s nothing I like better than having read a book and sitting back going ‘Hah, that was a fun ride.’

“It’s the reason why I keep reading John Scalzi. Even though I have serious issues with a lot of the stuff he’s doing, he can tell me a good story and he can keep me reading up until the end of the book.

“In terms of Omenana, I have to give all the credit to Mazi because he had been thinking about doing this for years. I do remember the day he called me up and was like, ‘I’m finally going to do this thing. Are you in?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, with both legs and a swimsuit on I’m in.’ (I get her to repeat that phrase so I can type it).

Mood indigo: Chinelo and Mazi Nwonwu at the Ake Festival 2016

“We need someone doing this. We have so many places where people publish stories, but we don’t have the level of curation that I would love to see sometimes, and I think that can only come … (breaks for thought) I used to work for a publishing house, I used to work for newspapers, and I think I bring in a certain eye to the kind of stories I want to tell.

“I also want to be a counterbalance to the white-dominated genre fiction that’s happening in South Africa. I wanted to make sure that we have the space … (breaks off).  I was educated in the diaspora so I have much more of a tendency to go for things written in a particular way that I find easier to recognize as a story. I’ve had a couple of stories come across my desk where I’m not sure if the person is playing with language or if they don’t understand that language very well.  And that can be a difficulty sometimes when choosing stories. And I admit that that is a bias I sometimes have.

“But I like to think we are providing a space that nobody else is quite doing right now. That gives me a kind of joy. It’s a lot of time (Laughs). It’s not easy. But it also gives me an excuse to read writers and say ‘I love this thing, I’m going to track this person down and get them to send me a story for Omenana.’

“I’m so glad that we’ve been able to publish first-timers that were just these gems. They had stuff on their blogs, but that was it. I’m actually surprised at how much … play Omenana has gotten and how much positivity has come along with it.

“Because we really thought it was going to be this thing in the corner that we were doing that hopefully some people would like. If they liked it, great, if they didn’t like it, oh well. But we’ve gotten so much goodwill? And I think that is what has surprised me more than anything else.

“We also got so much, just sheer good excellent content. I shouldn’t be surprised because that’s why we were doing this, but I am surprised that Ekari Mbvundula had not been published until Omenana. I find that strange. Sanya Noel, we were one of the first places to publish him. I’m like, ‘You guys are way too good. You should have been published by Apex or Interzone or something by now.’

“I sometimes worry that the stories in Omenana are a bit simplistic? But I also realize even in my own writing—because I recognize that English is one of many languages—my aim when I write my stories isn’t to dazzle people with my structural pyrotechnics or sentence flourishes. I want to be as clear as possible in what I’m saying. I want everybody to be able to read it. As long as you have a basic education you can understand what I’m trying to say. And I think that comes from being a reporter and valuing clarity of thought over beauty of structure.

“I want to tell new writers that if you can express yourself in the simplest of language then your idea stands a greater chance of getting across. So when I edit, I go for the jugular. I cut out all the hundred-naira words, all the words that are trying to perform English. I find that is something that happens much more when I read stories coming out of the West.

“I find the best kind of African writing is doing so in very very simple words, simple clear constructions. Which I think has to do with learning English as a second language, I suspect.

“I want stories written by a wide variety of Africans telling a wide variety of stories and doing it well. There were a couple of stories in the last issue that I turned down. They were basically performing Africa for me. I don’t know anything about the background of the writers but they were set in villages. There was a lot of pot carrying, a lot of visiting the haunted forest at night. These are tropes and clichés of African writing. These are written by people who don’t themselves live in a rural setting, who are creating a romanticized past, this amorphous pre-colonial time where everything was once-upon-a-time, but they are not doing folklore. So they are just sort of setting it in a village.

“I’m looking for stories that are trying to do something different, what I really love is to be able to get to the end of a story and go “Hah! That was nice, that was good.’ And every single story in this edition (Issue Eight) made me do that.”  

I change the subject to her time at Clarion.

Chinelo: “I applied to Clarion because Nnedi applied to Clarion. I always thought my work was not good enough for Clarion yet. It was not until I got published in Mothership. I was looking at Mothership and seeing these amazing stories by Daniel José Older or Junot Diaz, and my story was there among those amazing stories. It is a really really good collection.

“I noticed that people who were making it in the industry had either MFAs or they’d gone to some kind of rigorous intensive workshop. So I chose Clarion. I just said let me put this out there and see what happens. And I got in.

“That was a huge validation for me and my writing. To be able to say I really am … it’s not just arrogance or inflated sense of self. Maybe I really am good enough for that laurel I am always chasing. Getting into Clarion did that.

“While I was there, there’s a lot of great talent in that room … But what I didn’t see was focus. I didn’t see people who were saying OK, I want to write because …

“A lot of people were there because they enjoyed writing, because they enjoyed playing with words. Everybody is hoping for recognition. I was one of five people of colour, the only African woman there. And I noticed that for a lot of the people of colour there was a greater sense of ‘I’m not just doing for myself but for others, a greater sense of writing for a community.’ And saying ‘It’s not just about me and my enjoyment. I’m here to speak for other people, I’m here to represent,’ in a way that not many white writers are able to do. For some queer writers, I know that there is that sense of representation, of community.

“But I think there’s still definitely in the West a feeling that ‘I’m writing for my own personal fame. I want people to read my work.’ I realized that I have a potential because this (African speculative fiction) is only just starting. OK, I can get ahead of this thing and I can try to make sure we don’t fall into the potholes that genre fiction has in the West where it’s became this enclave for the misunderstood, the lonely white guy who feels like nobody loves him and so this is where he needs to be, and now he has to defend it from all encroachers. I think if we can start it out as something much more inclusive and much broader, we have a chance at the ground level to make this really work for us.

“The fact that I happen to be in Nigeria right now when this is happening is a real opportunity. Because if I were in diaspora, I would be listening to very different voices, I would be competing on a very different stage.

“It was at Clarion that I was able to crystallize the potential role I could have in genre here with my writing. I still have to battle self-criticism. The fact that I still don’t have a novel, I don’t have a collection of short stories. I’m in everybody’s thing but my own. The next stage is to get either a collection out or a novel out and establish some bona fides on that front.”

Suddenly Chinelo begins to talk again about Omenana.

“I don’t want to take credit where credit isn’t due. The fact is that Mazi is doing a lot of the hard lifting. He’s maintaining the website. He is paying for all the art out of pocket; he’s paying for the e-book creation out of pocket. Really the only thing I do is I edit. … I’m doing curation of the stories and deciding the content. I get all the content together and I email it all to him and then he makes the magic happen.

“I’m not trying to diminish my role or anything. This is a man with three kids, a wife, and a full-time job. If he wasn’t finding ways to carve out time to do this, it would just not happen.

“We’re both constantly on the lookout for people, places, phenomena that we want to feature in the book, writers that I would love to have stories from. I’ve already got stories for our next edition, the January edition. But if Mazi did not pour sweat and time—time he could be spending with his children—into this, this would not be a thing. It really wouldn’t.”

GR: “And he has to be willing to do all that and let you be the editor.”

Chinelo: “He has been very good about stepping back and letting me make executive decisions about things. In the beginning we tried to do this thing where he would choose stories and I would choose stories and we would have a discussion. As much as we are both lovers of the story, the fact is that I edit for a living. I ran the editorial section of a publishing house for two years. This is what I do. So when it comes to recognizing a certain level of quality, a certain held–togetherness of story, I happen to be quite good at that.

“Even when I was at Cassava Republic—I won’t lie—there were a lot of things that I did not do well at all. But when it came to choosing a good story, a good novel and saying this manuscript is going to be a pretty good novel, I think I was able to do that. Or even say, ‘OK, this manuscript isn’t quite there yet but here are the things that need to change so that it can be.’

“When you work with a writer who has the craft to take their work to the next level, there’s nothing more beautiful I feel than being able to say, ‘OK, these are signposts. See if you can follow it there and you’re going to have yourself an excellent version.’ Some writers are able to do that, some aren’t. When it all does come together, it’s like music.”

I start asking biographical questions.

Chinelo: “I studied English in college at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s a Christian school, which funnily enough is academically rigorous. It was a direct pipeline from my high school, which was a missionary school.

“My dad was a diplomat, so me and my siblings had the benefit of really good educations in international schools across the world.

“When I was a kid, I was lucky because my mom had this thing. We had these books on tape. They were picture books that came with tapes. She’d sit you down, put on a tape, and then you’d read along.

“Also my parents had a library. They were mostly trashy paperbacks. Lots of Sidney Sheldon. My mom had this romance, A Pirate’s Love. (Smile) I still remember the title.

“I read a lot of old standards. One of the first books I read—in middle school—getting into spec fic was Archer’s Goon (Diana Wynne Jones), and Sleator’s Interstellar Pig cracked my brain open. It’s about a game people play for planets and solar systems like playing cards. They have to play a game for ownership of Earth.

“There was also the Scholastic Book Fair that they would set up in the school gym. You’d get these coupons to choose ten books. I would go insane. I always loved books and would say they were my best friends. I grew up on Dickens’s Oliver Twist or The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Then came Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and it broke my head. It was amazing; I’d never seen anything like it.

“Then I got into speculative fiction. I read Stephen Donaldson, I read Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time. I read voraciously, starting out with a lot of white authors. I read Arthur C Clarke. I read Ursula Le Guin. The Left Hand of Darkness bent gender for me. When I started writing my first novel at thirteen, it was an SF novel about twins who land on a planet that is a matriarchy. I tried but I couldn’t get into Tolkien. Put some black or Asian women into it, make it more textured. I also read a lot of the African Writers series—Mongo Beti, Chinua Achebe, Flora Nwapa. Then I heard of Nnedi and finally got Zarah the Windseeker and the rest is history.

“My parents were able to keep me going in a missionary high school, then from there to the States. I did an MA in journalism. I tried to be a journalist for a while.

“I loved the rush of it but it put me into too much contact with people which it turns out to be something I’m … not very good at? I’m great at short interactions and when I have to sustain relationships it’s hard to do. Part of being a journalist is to do with being a diplomat, a consummate people-person who can cultivate and maintain complex relationships without tipping into the personal. I’m a freelance editor now and that’s turning out to be a good place for me. There’s a need for it in Nigeria and I happen to be not half bad at it.

“I worked for Cassava Republic for two years with Bibi (Bakare-Yusuf), and that’s what got me into the fiction game. I did that after working in newspapers for about five years. Directly after Cassava is when I started freelance editing.

“I do it mostly for corporate clients these days. I remember having this big back-and-forth with academics that felt I should not be switching between present and present conditional. I might not be able to explain the grammar, but believe me it sounds better.

“My biggest pushback is when I try to get people not to use corporate jargon. You know ‘capacity building’ is not really a thing. What are you actually trying to do? Train more trainers? That’s not hard to say.

“I like it because I can do it without draining myself of the creative energy I need. And the challenge right now in my life is time management and setting out separate and deliberate time for my writing. Even when I have chunks of time free I’m not doing much writing.

Chinelo with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o at the Ake Festival 2016
Photo courtesy Chinelo Onwualu

“Cassava Republic was both the most challenging period of time in my working life and the most fun. I think it had to do with the fact that publishing in Nigeria is not easy. And I have to give credit to Bibi for starting and persevering.

“I’ve since learned that my experience is not unique. Publishing is incredibly stressful. It’s filled with a lot of women at the bottom and middle tiers who are burning themselves out reading manuscript after manuscript and scrambling to make writers happy, printers happy or scrambling to be on Twitter every day to make sure the word goes out. There are never enough people and it pays so badly.

“I was living with my parents. Believe me, living with your parents in your thirties is not fun. (Laughs).

“I had just returned from the US. I was still in this place where I was reeling from what I perceived as a personal failure of not making it abroad, and having to come home with quote unquote nothing to show for time over there except a degree.

“I think a lot of authors scapegoat their publishers while at the same time approaching African publishers with this genuine and distinct air of condescension because they think that we are just not as good as being published in the West.

“There are a number of authors who I would still be OK with if I had never worked with them as a publisher (Laughs). Having seen the other side of things I know that it’s much more complicated than we think. When we hear authors complain ‘Oh, the publisher didn’t have the book at the festival. I’m sure I’m selling ten times more than the publisher says I’m selling,’ the truth is more complicated.

“When I left Cassava Republic they were owed millions of naira from bookstores who would not pay, or from corporate and government entities who had ordered tons of books for some programme or other, and then of course the money that was supposed to be paid to us disappeared into the ether and nobody could account for it. Small-time distributors would promise ‘Oh, I will get your books into twenty bookstores in the southeast’ and then disappear with both the books and of course the money those books might have brought in. Things like that.

“It was stressful in that it had its share of interoffice politics. I came in with no previous publishing experience so I was making rookie mistakes, but I did discover my ability to know what a story needs and how to fix it.

“You’d be surprised just how many authors are highly resistant to being edited by an African publisher. Because there is a sense that we just don’t know as much as a Western publisher would. Even though you have a situation where the Western editor is telling you to describe what a (street) market is. And I’m saying you are selling your book to Nigerians. Nigerians know what a street market is. You don’t need two more paragraphs describing the layout of a market and what people wear. There is this real sense of superiority.

“The writer who was great to work with, willing to take editorial direction, until they got an agent and all of a sudden you can’t tell them nuttin as Americans would say. They’re done. They’ve gotten too big for you. I can’t tell you how many times that happened.

“Very often it’s home-grown authors. I found with diaspora authors that there is hunger to be recognized at home. Once they have made it in the West, then they turn to home to see if people in their hometown also recognize them. The Western recognition is great but it’s the homegrown recognition is what they really crave, most of them. And so you find that sometimes they can be a little bit easier to work with.

“There’s a great deal of mistrust I think between African writers and African publishers, and not for no reason.  

“Cassava Republic is one of the few publishers that has a traditional publishing structure and isn’t just a glorified printer. A lot of publishers here are pay-to-publish outfits where you find your own editor, you come with your own art and they will bind it and print if for you and that’s that. Even with legacy publishing houses, the editorial strength is just not there.

“A number of African publishers that I would say are doing a lot of great work … (trails off) I think Nigeria is probably unique in that sense. Because our publishing infrastructure was such shambles before Farafina or Cassava Republic came along. Even now if I had to choose places to publish my book if I had it written, there are not many places. I won’t lie.”

We talk about the number of big-name African authors who actually now live or teach in the West.

Chinelo: “It’s kind of the way it goes. It’s something I have to struggle with myself right now in Nigeria, starting the arc of what I see as my career. At some point in my own personal life, in order to have the benefit of decent health care, for instance, I may need to move to a foreign country. My partner currently is in Canada. If I have a hope of starting a family and all that good stuff, I may need to leave Nigeria. But if I do, I will immediately lose touch with where my stories come from, that which brings my stories vitality.

“I saw it when I lived there and I saw the transformation in my writing when I came back. It’s water and fire. There’s no comparison.  I got better as a writer when I got back to Nigeria.

“What I found oddly enough is that when I am away, I find the space in my thoughts to be able to write. That’s when all these thoughts swimming around in my head can now get down on paper. With the Nigerian economy as it is, I think what I need is a combination of going away a little bit and then coming back.”

GR: “Why are you a writer?”

Chinelo: “That’s a very good question. (breaks for thought) I’m going to have to get a little spiritual with you for a minute.

“My mom is Catholic, and I grew up Catholic for some part of my time. Right now I’m not religious. I … believe talent is something that comes from the spirit. When your talent and your purpose align, that’s when you truly start to live. Most people in the world do not ever get that chance to discover what they’re good at and then get to do it in a way that brings them joy.

“I’m a writer primarily because I’m good at it, and it turns out, that it’s not something that comes naturally or easily to everyone. It turns out that it’s not something that everyone can do and that’s been a little bit interesting to find out. When I think of a thought and put it down on paper, I can make it sound as it should sound. It’s not something a lot of people can do easily.

“I think I persist in writing because I have something to say. I haven’t figured it out yet. I do believe that your talent is like a vessel and it’s given to you to carry something. There’s no greater tragedy than to have a talent at something and not be allowed to do it, or be made to devalue it because you know, oh, ‘Girls don’t paint’ or ‘You’re a boy and you shouldn’t be cooking.’ And yet your talent is to create food for people.

“That’s not to say that I’m living this life where I get out of bed singing Ave Maria every morning because yes! I get to write!

“The question of why I write is still something I’m figuring out; but as I do it and as I give it more importance, I stop devaluing it—because for many years I thought of writing as that throwaway thing when I have quote unquote more serious things to do. It’s a slow process that I’m still working through, to give myself permission to write, because I find that when I do write, I’m happier and I feel more filled up in a way that allows me to then give to other people.

“So when I edit other people’s writing, it’s an act of nurturance; it’s an act of taking care of them. And I think that for better or worse, nurturing is something that I’m actually pretty good at even though I don’t necessarily enjoy it. (Chuckles) I live in a society where people use the excuse of nurturance to oppress. People insist that you nurture them even when you have nothing to give. People insist that in order to nurture you must stay in a particular place at a particular time and then be excluded from doing other things. There is a gendered notion of nurturance that ends up oppressing women: the cult of motherhood, and that oppresses women.

“But writing is this act of doing that fills me up so that I can then edit, this act of giving.“

Since the Interview

Chinelo did indeed move to Canada. She has become connected with the journal Anathema. She has published fiction, including a story in Uncanny called “Read Before Use” that was shortlisted for the Nommo Award for best speculative short story. She is still editing Omenana with issue twelve due out soon.

(Next)

He found a bench on the street.  He knew he had to sit down to play the kind of music he wanted to play.  So he sat down on the bench. Lela’s mother joined them with a look of horror on her face, sensing that trouble was on their doorstep.  She sat on the pavement and folded her arms across her breasts. And as the first chords echoed from Taduno’s guitar, her conscience began to torment her.

Slowly, the music spread throughout the neighbourhood, soft and colourful. The people began to gather one by one, cautiously knowing soldiers were nearby. They remembered that the President had proscribed all association through music, but they were enthralled by the melodies that suddenly filled the empty spaces in their lives.  So they came.

Among those gathered were Vulcaniser and several others from his street, who had not ventured out of their homes in days.  They all came out to listen. And as they did, they shook their heads in wonder and joy.

Judah placed his palms on his little cheeks and stared at Taduno in astonishment: how could his parents ever think of giving such a wonderful man away?

*

Taduno told simple stories with his music, shifting from one story to the next with glorious ease. He spoke in the tone of a folksinger through his guitar to the large crowd that had gathered and they understood the meaning of the music and the flow of his emotions.

He did not chastise Lela’s parents with his music.  Instead he attempted to stir the conscience of all. And so he played beautiful wordless songs that his listeners would remember for a long time.

The soldiers soon showed up, causing many to take to their heels.  They came with guns and tear gas and grenades, but Taduno’s music softened their hearts and they lowered their guns and opened their mouths in amazement.  Those who had taken off came back when they saw that the soldiers were not attempting to arrest anyone.

Momentarily transformed by the music they were hearing, the soldiers took off their helmets.  They wiped the soot from their faces with their bare hands. They wanted the people to see them as human beings, not monsters.  But it was nothing more than a fleeting transformation. Soon, it occurred to them that in the end they had to answer to the President, not to the people, and certainly not to some musician, however brilliant he was.  And so, they pushed through the crowd and arrested Taduno.

From Taduno’s Song.

Taduno’s Song by Odafe Atogun is a romance of music, love, and resistance. Heartfelt, occasionally sentimental, it pulls off the trick of communicating the emotional power of music. Many good novels fall apart at the end but this climax draws its bowstrings tight. It’s written in pared-back, international style that reaches out to a wide audience. It’s been published by important houses in both the UK and the USA and earned its author a two-book deal in both markets, and went on to sell to be published in Germany.

In essence it’s about Fela Kuti. Though it follows aspects of the real Kuti’s biography—the regime really did throw Fela’s mother off a roof—the character of Taduno is totally unlike Fela Kuti both in personality and music. Fela played political Afro-jazz; Taduno plays what seems to be a kind of guitar folk music.  Fela Kuti was also incomparably wilder than Taduno regarding women and drugs.

Odafe: “This is not a biography. And when in fiction when you carry a real-life personality to create your fictional character, I don’t use the minutiae of real life to create my character. What I do is to take the crux of his vision, and his vision was to transform society through his music. That is the aspect of Fela Kuti that I took for the character called Taduno.

“You find artists that come once in a lifetime. Fela Kuti is such an artist. It’s a fact that no other artist had as big an influence on the Nigerian society like Fela Kuti did, so we could call him a genius in that sense.  We could say that he has a unique voice that could be identified first time. We are not talking about an ordinary musician here. We are talking about Fela Kuti.

“Fela is unique. He shared his home with anyone who strayed there. All you had to do was stray to his house and you find a place to put your head. Stray to Fela’s house and you’ll find something to eat. You could count the clothes he had or the material possessions he had. Which is why this story was necessary for me to tell to bring certain revelations to the readers.”

A banner on Fela Kuti’s house in Lagos

Taduno’s Song has a very romantic vision. The hero’s voice has been destroyed through torture, but his guitar playing channels the despair of the poor, the homeless with whom he sleeps rough in a park. Yet, even the people in his old neighbourhood turn on him.

Odafe: “It’s allegorical. When you are an artist struggling to find your form, struggling to find your place in society, it’s seldom that you find many friends. It’s seldom that you find love.

“I went on holiday to Ireland, Dublin, and I went sightseeing to the house of Bono, the U2 musician, and while I was in front of his gate I was reading a passage engraved on the gate and it occurred to me that musicians are powerful activists and that their work transforms society. So my mind went to Fela Kuti and I realized that he did so much through his music to promote social and political change. I decided to write a story premised on his struggles and his music. I realized that his voice was a lone voice in the fight against brutal dictatorship of those days.”

Taduno’s Song was not Odafe’s first attempt to sell to Random House.

Odafe: “I had written the first four chapters of another story and it sent to an editor of Random House. He liked it, and within four hours of receiving the manuscript, he requested the rest of the manuscript. I was still on the first four chapters.

“I told him OK, I was finished, but I wanted to edit, and told him to give me two weeks. So I went out and bought a power generator and wrote three hundred pages in two weeks. But of course when I sent it to him he was not impressed with the rest of the book, as it was a very rushed work.

“That was a learning curve for me. What I did was compare the first four chapters with the rest of the manuscript and saw through my own eyes what I was doing wrong, what I was doing well.

“That experience of writing furiously in two weeks came to my aid because I was able to write Taduno’s Song in three months.”

The speculative element is that somehow, almost magically, everyone has forgotten who this Fela Kuti is.  He gets a mysterious letter that tells him his sweetheart Lela has been imprisoned just for knowing him. Taduno goes back to his old house. No one recognizes him, not his neighbours, not his friends, and not Judah, the young brother of his beloved Lela.

The regime has destroyed every copy of his records, every poster, burned his house, removed his name, and this has somehow destroyed the memory of him. But the regime finds they need his music too—they want him to sing praise songs. And they hold Lela hostage to make him.

The now voiceless ex-singer plays for the poor or the homeless, almost magically channelling their histories through wordless guitar. Can he bring himself to praise dictators even to save Lela?

The book compresses so much stuff together—voicelessness, celebrity, politics, the birdsong of beauty and love. But I’m not sure I ever quite squared how Taduno could be forgotten with the regime’s determination to use him for their propaganda.  

Odafe: “That’s the aspect that typifies the story as a myth. What I was trying to explore is that when society is against you, they forget you. When you are a threat to the government and the government is after you and your supporters, then everybody shies away from you. The government pretends you no longer exist because it’s afraid of you. You continue to inhabit the space in their mind so that they never know rest.

“Taduno, once so very famous, is becoming anonymous, unknown. I think it tells us how our art, our vision, could alienate us from society.”

GR: “It’s like his spirit has moved into a different body …”

Odafe: “Yes…”

GR: “And nobody recognizes him.”

Odafe: “Sure. Let’s assume Taduno was forgotten, had died. His reincarnation shows how much he believes in his art.

“In society out there, there are lots of people, talented people, who have been driven into a state of homelessness by pursuit of their dreams. These are not vagrant dregs of society, but people who are burdened with the need to transform society for justice, equality, and peace.

“Sometimes the burden we carry on our shoulders in our desire to see a transformed society can drive us into a state where we are vagrants.”

GR: “Have you ever been a vagrant?”

Odafe: “Yes, I say in some way a vagrant, in some way. When you don’t know what tomorrow or today holds, when you are in restless state of existence, with a vision you cannot share with the world because the world will laugh at you, I would say you are a vagrant …

“As a writer in the beginning, I told my friends I am a writer. They laughed at me. So I stopped telling them am a writer. But deep down I was pursuing literary success with every drop of my blood. In that state I would say I was a vagrant because nobody believed in my vision.”

I double-check that he hadn’t ever really been a vagrant, and start trying to explore a bit more about his life. The book is so convincingly set in Lagos. Had he ever lived there?

Odafe: “I lived in Lagos or about four years between 1990 and 1994. That was during the period of the military dictatorship and June 12.”

Western readers might not know that June 12, 1993, is the date of a general election that was annulled by the dictatorship.  It is a date deeply engraved in Nigeria’s consciousness. There is a highly regarded graphic novel by Abraham Oshoko about the events, called simply June 12.  

June XII is another comic featuring a violent and vengeful sort-of hero named after the date, and developed by Ibrahim Ganiyu and still published by Vortex Comics.  

Odafe knew the very different Lagos of twenty-five years ago.

Odafe: “A lot has changed in Lagos in terms of development and infrastructure and in terms of the way the people engage the government. But some of the inequalities and social injustices that Fela Kuti sang against still exist.

“For instance, it’s still difficult for a poor man to send his children to school. It’s difficult for a poor man to get a power supply because all of the rich people use power generators. Fela sang about a society without light, a society without water. You think ‘Oh, we are in the twenty-first century, things should be better,’ but they are getting worse.

“But in the way people engage the government, now we have social media. We have multiple avenues to disseminate news. So people are better able to engage the government. But government remains powerful and that engagement is not yielding the desired result, so we are still facing the negativity that Fela Kuti sang against.”

I keep asking him about his life then and his previous fiction.  

“When I was twenty years old, I was still in school in my higher education, at A levels then. I was reading a lot at that point—James Hadley Chase, a lot of crime thrillers, Frederick Forsyth, Jeffrey Archer.   

“The first story I wrote was around that period. It was a crime thriller that I destroyed years later when I was more mature. I thought this is not what I want to write so I just burnt it up, a book of about three hundred to four hundred pages.

“By twenty-five, I was studying for accountancy. I wrote a collection of short stories, five short stories which I self-published. But it had no impact. That was about 1992 or 1993. I have the soft copy; I have it on computer. I had to do marketing myself. I had to give out a lot of complimentary copies, to say, ‘Look I’m a writer.’”

That was the era when publishers like MacMillan or Longman’s started to pull out of Africa. What had been a thriving reading and publishing culture, with figures like Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka editing, publishing, or translating works ebbed away under the feet of a whole generation.  

Odafe: “I never worked as an accountant. I worked in communications. After accountancy, I studied journalism for a while in Lagos at a journalism school. I worked briefly for a magazine that is defunct now. The proprietor died so it closed down. That was many years ago—Classic magazine. It was a soft-sell magazine like … like News of the World and all that.”  

I ask Odafe how it feels to become suddenly so successful and at forty-nine. He avoids answering by joking, “I don’t look my age. I look thirty-five, thirty-six.” It tell him it’s because he so evidently works out. Then he gets serious.

Odafe: “At first I plunged into depths of depression with success, because I felt, ‘Oh, this will be so brief a success after all.’ This sense of doubt, of disbelief—‘Is this really happening?’  

“But what got me going was that both Canongate (in the UK) and Random House (in the USA) signed me to a two-book deal without saying a word about the second book. I felt this was a challenge, and it helped me to come up with a book in record time, which I’ve submitted to Canongate.  

“It took me four months and eighteen days precisely. There was so much power outage that sometimes couldn’t write for a day or two, so that slowed me down a bit. I was able to send it to them on 19th of May (2016) and I did not get any response for a while. Then one day I got a message on my phone to say that they have paid the advance fee for the second book. ‘So OK they like it.’ I spoke to my agent (Toby Mundy) and he said, ‘Yes, we’ve done it again.’

“It’s about the place of orphans in our society, in a society that believes so much in tradition and the place of a single mother struggling to raise her only child in that evil society.”  

The next part of the recording goes in circles as I try to sort out that he’d really called his own society evil. I thought he’d said “Igbo.” Evil?

Odafe: “Yes, an evil society. That tradition exists. Orphans are seen as outcasts. It still exists in Nigerian society of today even though it’s not so prevalent. Orphans are treated as evil. Some say, ‘Oh, they killed their parents,’ so they believe them to be evil children. So they can’t live normally. They cannot interact normally. They are not allowed to play with other children. They are treated basically as slaves. At every opportunity, they are beaten and ill treated in so many terrible ways.

“The story is about a widow who had lost her husband at a very young age is afraid that if she should die, her son will be treated like other orphans in the village.  

“I titled it Wake Me When I’m Dead but my publishers … we have agreed to change it to Wake Me When I’m Gone. They think ‘gone’ is more appropriate and on second thought I agree with them.”

He mentions in passing that his wife is a great support to him, which sounds lovely, so I ask him a bit more.

Odafe: “I will make that very brief. Every artist needs support or you lose belief in yourself and what you want to achieve as a writer or artist. When you have a supportive spouse I think it helps. Who understands your need for solitude to develop your art. Who understands the need for you to be persistent to attain success.

“Most spouses would say you are wasting your time trying to be a writer or trying to be a musician. And that would dampen your spirits really. But when you have someone supportive, it goes a long way. Which is what I enjoyed.

“My earlier reference to being a vagrant. For so many years I was a vagrant. Because I was moving within different spaces in society without being able to express myself openly as an artist because many would laugh at me. Many would see me as being lazy or mad dreamer. So I was a vagrant artist, so to say.

“I was going various jobs but beneath it all but every night I would get to my computer to write or write in my notebooks. I was still pursuing and developing my art as a writer without anyone knowing about it. Being a vagrant artist, I could not share my dreams with anyone. Can you imagine someone that’s homeless, a dreamer going around telling people on the street, ‘Look I’m going to be Bill Gates one day, I’m working to become a scientist one day.’ He cannot. Because they will see him as a madman.  We experience vagrancy as human beings at different levels and forms.”

Odafe did a range of jobs in journalism or consultancy, freelancing as an editorial consultant. He wrote for Nigeria Link magazine and for The Melting Pot.

Odafe: “I was basically writing news articles and fiction. I was not a reporter, so to say. I was writing features. I remember one particular story I did for Trumpet newspaper way back in the late nineties.  Before Obasango became civilian president in Nigeria, I wrote an article ‘Obasango the Second Coming.’ In that article, I predicted he would come back as civilian president and he did. I said the military would like to hand over to someone they can trust, so that they can remain protected.”

We then talk about football, and its influence for good on young people, and which premier league team he supports, and the price of tickets and how fans are short-changed. He suggests a lottery to make an individual football fan a millionaire, then talks about the books that influenced him as an adult. There are four particular books:

“Those that prompted and deepened my art, I would say four. First, Marquez 100 Years of Solitude. The second is Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and the third is J.M. Coetzee Disgrace.  

“The fourth I won’t pin down to a particular book, but the whole range of his books influenced me and that was Ben Okri (author the Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road).

“I wasn’t located in any particular space of creativity all through my fruitless years. I did a lot of writing, enormous amount of writing. I don’t advise any writer to try this, but I wrote so many stories and destroyed each one of them.  

“I would write a story, read it and then destroy. Because I felt it was not good enough. Each time I wrote, I experimented. I see what I don’t like in the first story and I try to improve in this one. And I did that consistently for years. So in that way, I was distilling my art in a very painful and slow way. And that is what permits me to write a story in four months and three months.

“In those years I was plagued by self-doubt. I didn’t like my style, I didn’t like this, I didn’t like that. It was like training, every day, every single day in solitary confinement. And nobody knows what you are doing. So when you now reveal to the world what you are doing, it comes as a huge surprise.

“I wanted a style that would be unique. Not just unique but consumable by readers. I wanted to develop a timeless, universal classic. Whatever I write, I must be sure it’s timeless. Every generation can read and connect with it, of any nationality. Taduno’s Song is talking about tyranny because tyranny has the same face everywhere in the world. Because tyrants have the same ambition anywhere in the world. Classic is a story that you feel is worthy of being read. That’s my goal, timeless, universal classics.”

We talk a bit about his earlier reading.

“My first romance with literature began with Chinua Achebe in secondary school, then Gulliver’s Travels, and Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton.

“At six years old? I can’t remember reading much fiction. I had a very difficult upbringing, which I don’t like talking about because as a child I lived away from my parents.  

“I attended six different primary schools. You spend six years in primary school in Nigeria, right? Each of those years I experienced a new primary school, so I did not have the time to settle down to make friends. Each year we moved to a different village, a different town. And I lived away from my parents.

“It’s weird. Those years gave me the power to look at things in very fluid forms. I tried to retain things as much as possible from the previous experience. It made it possible for me to write a story that is very complex, but look, there is a thread that runs though it all. So that experience really helped me as a writer.  

“It was there that the power of my imagination began to form because whenever I was sad as a child with no parents to console me, I would imagine myself in a place where everything was beautiful. I would try to live the reality to escape my difficult realities. I would imagine a world where I could find happiness.

“I was the best in literature in secondary school, the best in English. I would always get the highest score. I went to two different secondary schools, but that was much better than six primary schools. There were a few very close friends but I left them behind each time I moved, so there was nothing like building a friendship from that stage of my life.

“I have one brother and one sister, but we were all separate. My brother lived in a different place; my sister lived with my mother. My parents were divorced. I was living with parents’ friends whom I didn’t know from before. It was a very harrowing experience.

“My father was a headmaster. My mother was a trader, basically uneducated though she could speak English and Pidgin. My father was very tough, the way he raised us with strict discipline. A headmaster back in those days. He felt that if he was disciplining school people, his own child should get twice that amount of discipline.      

“So I was never able to impress him enough; he never said ‘Well done, my son.’ It was always, ‘You’re not doing enough.’ It was like placing a burden on a child. Which is what I’ve avoided most with my own son. What I desired most was to form a friendship with my father, but I could not, say, ‘Hey, Daddy,’ and tap him on his shoulder. I didn’t see much of my mother until I was seventeen. In his final years he tried to sit down with me and have a proper chat, but the gulf was too wide. The intimacy was not there.

“In later years we related in cordial manner. In the end I discovered a good man who could not draw a line between discipline and affection for his child. One should have room in your heart to shower children with affection. But he saw affection as discipline, felt that discipline expressed love, but for a child that is not good enough.

“I’m a full-time writer at the moment. I reached that decision when I got the two-book deal, and then the German publishers did the same, and I thought, ‘Why not go for it?’  

“Before that I was working as editorial consultant for the magazine of the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory.  I did a bit of printing for them. I did a bit of promotion stuff for them like producing gift items for the Minister. I was getting to the finishing line of my self-training as a writer. I said to people, ‘I’m not a contractor, I’m a writer.’ I would say that. People would laugh, just snigger, and never take me seriously.

“A chap was asking me, ‘You say you are a writer, so are you publishing any book at the moment?’ And I said, ‘No, but I have one that will soon be published.’ And he asked which publisher and I said, ‘Faber and Faber’ and he said, ‘Wow, that is big.’ And he asks me when it’s coming out. And I kept keeping up with that lie. (Laughs).

“My success has made me humbler than ever before. One thing I have realized is that I am very fortunate. There are other writers out there who are very good but fortune has not smiled on them the way it’s smiled on me. I see myself as an artist. I am supposed to portray, typify humility as an artist. I can’t go around carrying myself like a star. Like, ‘Oh, I’m a great writer.’ Whatever I’ve achieved I got from society. Whatever stories I told, I told them by drawing from society, so I need to reflect to society a picture of humility and compassion and simplicity.”

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