2024 was a good year for African Speculative Fiction. From novels like Tlotlo Tsamaase’s Womb City, Nikhil Singh’s Dakini Atoll, Shubnum Khan’s The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Anguish and Anarchy, Kerstin Hall’s Asunder, Namina Forna’s The Eternal Ones, Saara El-Arifi’s Faebound, O.O. Sangoyomi’s Masquerade, Helen Oyeyemi’s Parasol Against the Axe, Umar Abubakar Sidi’s The Incredible Dreams of Garba Dakaskus, TL Huchu’s The Legacy of Arniston House, Hadeer Elsbai’s The Weavers of Alamaxa, Craig Kofi Farmer’s Kwame Crashes the Underworld; to novellas like Cheryl Ntumy’s Songs For The Shadows, Kemi Ashing-Giwa’s This World Is Not Yours, C.L. Farley’s The Invisible Girl, Ivana Ofori Akotowaa’s The Year of Return, Nnedi Okorafor’s She Who Knows, Tobi Ogundiran’s In the Shadow of the Fall, Xan van Rooyen’s Waypoint Seven, Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Lost Ark Dreaming, Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, Moses Ose Utomi’s The Truth of the Aleke; and Collections like Pemi Aguda’s Ghostroots, Eugen Bacon’s A Place Between Waking and Forgetting, my own Convergence Problems, among others, there were plenty of books to choose from.
But that’s not really why we’re here.
We’re here to talk short fiction.
I wrote my own share of short fiction last year, with a new collection Convergence Problems that came out in February and a few new stories as well. But, and more relevantly, every year, since 20151, I have made a list highlighting the African speculative fiction short fiction I read and enjoyed the most. The stories I found most compelling and wanted to let others know about too. I started doing this for two reasons:
First: Because I love short fiction. Flash. Short Stories. Novelettes. Even the occasional short novella (though I don’t include them in these lists). I always have. I grew up reading a lot of short fiction. There is something special about the way a great piece of short fiction can immerse the reader in a world, capture the essence of a concept or idea and play with style and structure to do something fascinating without requiring a major time commitment from the reader. To paraphrase something, I heard Cate Kennedy say: if a novel is like swimming across a pool of ideas and characters and themes, then short fiction is like a competitive dive, a leap from springboard, a twisting of the mind and a momentary, deep plunge into the water before coming up for air.
Second: For a long time, African speculative fiction was not widely recognized by the global reading community. Sure, it was being published some of the more literary-leaning stories were garnering some acclaim here and there but as recently as the early 2010’s, it was still rare to find an African speculative fiction story on, say, the Locus Recommended Reading List. This was also one of the motivations behind creating the African Speculative Fiction Society’s Database of published African SFF. While I no longer maintain that database (the last entry is from 2021), I still read the field widely, and I am grateful to be able to tell other about the wonderful stories I continue to find, stories that move me, touch me, make me think.
Generally speaking, African speculative short fiction (for the purpose of this list, defined as novelettes or shorter, i.e. works under 17500 words) continues to show signs of growth and increased visibility. It really seems to me that there is a whole generation of young writers across the African continent (re)embracing speculative fiction and producing work that could be signs of great careers to come. The Nommo awards made a return this year and produced a strong shortlist of short stories. Omenana Magazine continued to chug along with some good stories published this year, even if it seems to have stagnated somewhat in terms of pay rates, readership, story quality and visibility profile. Thankfully, they are no longer the only dedicated African speculative short fiction publisher on the continent. The folks at Will This Be A Problem who have put out five anthologies of African speculative fiction over the last decade (the first was in 2014!) with little fanfare or notice from the wider SFF community—especially when compared to Omenana which started around the same time—just launched a promising new magazine this year and announced a new volume of the anthology. Many African literary magazines like Lolwe, The Kalahari Review, Isele, The Shallow Tales Review, Kweli, etc., continue to publish work with overt speculative elements and its one of my great joys to read through these magazines and find a gem of a speculative story.
So, that said, let’s see what short fiction I read and loved this year shall we? Here are 10 of the best2 African speculative short fiction I read3 in 2024, in no particular order.
1. “We Who Will Not Die” (Psychopomp) by Shingai Njeri Kagunda (Kenya)
Science fiction stories using the arrival of aliens as way to interrogate the colonial enterprise are not uncommon in speculative fiction and 2024 brought us two great examples by African authors. “You Don’t Belong Where You Don’t Belong” by Kemi Ashing-Giwa (Reactor), which is brilliant in its worldbuilding, and my pick for this list, “We Who Will Not Die” by Shingai Njeri Kagunda, which brilliantly combines several ideas into a wonderful and fascinating story. The story follows two friends Nima and Tuni on a world in a remote part of a galactic empire, a world in balance with itself and its people, people for who death is not an end but part of a cyclic process. Nima, who believes she was a star that went supernova in her past life, finds her current life changed irrevocably by the arrival of aliens in service of an empire on their world. It’s a brilliant, layered decolonial story of love and education and culture and duty and time and even genocide, told in Shingai’s signature non-linear style and beautiful prose. And it all builds up to a spectacular, explosive end. This one is highly recommended and is hands down one of my favorite stories of the year.
I’ll also note that if you enjoyed this story, you should absolutely also check out Shingai’s other story “Let the Star Explode”, in Lightspeed which is just as fascinating and explores some of the same themes and which I was tempted to put on this list just for using “pole pole” in a science fictional context.
2. “The Wonders of the World” (Ghostroots) by Pemi Aguda (Nigeria)
“Faith is a Butterfly Resting on a Rotting Eye (or The Art of Faith)” (Strange Horizons) by Gabrielle Emem Harry (Nigeria)
I usually try to avoid ties on these lists, and I usually fail because sometimes I just come across two stories that are both great in different ways but share significant enough DNA to be considered in conversation with one another and in this case, “The Wonders of the World” and “Faith is a Butterfly Resting on a Rotting Eye (or The Art of Faith)” are both stories about faith, featuring protagonists who have become detached from family and community, and in both cases, the speculative element can be read as ambiguous (a kind of Schrödinger’s speculation, that allows them to both be speculative and not speculative at the same time, depending on your interpretation).
In “The Wonders of the World”, we follow Abisola, a chronically unhappy young girl on a school trip to the mystical Erin-Ijesha waterfalls as she befriends a classmate who claims to possess magical healing powers leading to experiences that change her. It’s an intimate, beautiful story and is very much recommended. In “Faith is a Butterfly Resting on a Rotting Eye (or The Art of Faith)” we meet Udo, the less loved of two brothers. When his older brother Akpan, is demanded as a sacrifice to the river god by the community, he leaves, seeking to find a better place and better gods but instead is confronted by silence and the dark hearts of his fellow men, leading to murder, revenge and, in sense, a godhood of his own. I wont spoil too much but suffice it to say that this reads as both a kind of prequel to Harry’s Nommo-award winning story “A Name Is A Plea And A Prophecy” (watch for the name “Adeh”) and a criticism of religious dogmas. A memorable and intriguing story.
3. “Hiraeth” (Mombera Rising) by Muthi Nhlema (Malawi)
I find stories that are created as a result of multidisciplinary collaborations between artists, scientists and social-cultural experts fascinating and often revealing in the way they can allow for a cross-pollination and new expressions of ideas, when they work. Mombera Rising is the result of one such collaboration, The African Futures project led by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, in collaboration with the Mzimba Heritage Association, the Mabilabo Social Support Organization, the Future Ecosystems For Africa program at the University of the Witwatersrand and Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation. It is an anthology of three stories, “Khanyisile” and “Mombera Kingdom” by Ekari Mbvundula Chirombo and “Hiraeth” by Muthi Nhlema, my favorite.
Set in 2099 along an imagined future timeline where the Mzimba people of Malawi have become a semi-independent eco-state focused on land restoration and a return to balance with nature (“Hiraeth” means “a deep longing for something, especially one’s home” in Welsh). The story follows Koyi, an Ensangweni (one of the eight elders who advises the Inkosi—the king), as he discovers troubling news during a negotiation with “the Southlanders” (implied to be the rest of Malawi). News of a forbidden new technology that could reignite the war between the two groups. This is a genre-blending novelette (I estimate) that has rich worldbuilding and is full of interesting ideas about the balance between man and nature. It’s a bit overwritten, but once immersed, you won’t want to stop turning the pages until the big, thematically resonant ending. Recommended.
4. “The Grit Born” (The Dark Magazine) by Frances Ogamba (Nigeria)
This is a weird one, in the best possible way. In “The Grit Born,” Egoabia, a seamstress, wants a child but doesn’t want to deal with men and can’t afford IFV or adoption so she purchases a powder from a company called Rebirth, a powder that can be mixed with clay and molded into a child. She makes a boy named Ude who grows by crumbling and reforming, something she needs to hide from the outside world. Through a message board for Rebirth customers, she gets the usual things one can find online, internet information, encouragement and judgment in equal measure and she manages along. But Ude continues to become more independent until one day he makes himself a brother from his own clay, and withdraws from her, after which she becomes convinced that the children will harm her leading her to take a terrible preemptive action.
This theme of yearning for something and then being haunted after getting a somewhat corrupted version of it also appears in several African horror stories, I read including two others that almost made the list—“Hallowed is the Flesh” by B.T. Karuma of Zimbabwe, in Lolwe Magazine and “Spirit Husband” by Uchechukwu Nwaka in Pseudopod. What elevates Ogamba’s story for me are the rising sense of wrongness, the blend of the mystical with the technological, the exploration of multiple axes of anxiety around parenthood, and its evocation of fabulist feeling while being something entirely its own.
5. “Unicorn2512” (Egypt + 100) by Nora Nagi (Egypt), translated by Mayada Ibrahim
Set in a dystopian future Egypt where people are completely isolated, living in tiny apartments with their bodies hooked up to something like life-support (reminiscent of the 2009 movie Surrogates), while their minds are connected to a virtual world, a “metaverse” of sorts. Public gatherings are outlawed by the government to reduce the chances of insurrection. When a middle-aged woman known only by her on-screen alias Unicorn2512, who still trying to emotionally process the death of her mother, realizes her own death is imminent, she decides to tell a story, a struggle when most words have been banned. But her actions eventually break the virtual spell and help bring people together again in the real world. It’s a thoughtful, unexpectedly hopefully story (something it shares with Chaka Nkone’s also excellent “To Eat Your Own Head” in Asimov’s) that explores what it means for people to come together and use language as a tool for freedom in an anthology dedicated to just that, extrapolating a hundred years from the 2011 protests in Tahrir Square that led to the removal of Hosni Mubarak during the Arab Spring. Highly recommended.
6. “The Future Ancients” (Will This Be A Problem: The Magazine) by Mwenya Chikwa (Zambia)
This one is just a ton of fun. A wild, fast paced adventure story that is a mad cocktail of inventive Africanfuturistic ideas, including sentient planets, interplanetary travel through an ancestral plane, drug clouds made of preserved nano-organisms and a war between cousin clans. The story literally “blasts off” when Bukata, our protagonist, and her nomadic clan begin migration away from their current planet Chepela, on a journey back to their clan’s home planet. Bukata and her brother Munthali make for a great sibling dynamic that carries the action of the story. “The Future Ancients” is a wildly imaginative and enjoyable Africanfuturist space opera, and I am here for it.
7. “Love Is Out of Choice” (Kweli Journal) by iman adam (Kenya)
iman adam’s writing has been a revelation to me. I first came across their work in Lolwe Magazine, with the brilliant “The Rain Translates My Bibi to Me” which is written with an assured confidence and is full of strikingly beautiful language as it explores migration and the yearning for home. That story isn’t quite speculative, even if it has a speculative sensibility (check it out anyway) but I am happy to report that this story, “Love Is Out of Choice”, is definitely speculative, while still possessing all of the literary and thematic flair of their previous work. With a Djinn as its narrator, the story follows Abedi, a child born “born feet-first in prostration, body prayer-folded, head bowed to God in a furious plea” after receiving a message from God while in the womb, “telling him to pray his body away”. Abedi is thus born into a body he is uncomfortable with and one day when his mother sees him wearing women’s clothes and trying to pray, she panics and lashes out, leading Abedi to “leave his body” in a series of physical and spiritual displacements and possessions until he eventually leaves home. Much like Plangdi Neple’s also excellent “Bodies of Sand and Blood” in Cast Of Wonders, this is a beautiful and sad story about body dysphoria and religion and parental love. But this story elevates itself in how its told, using intoxicating language that makes it uniquely powerful in delivery. This story will stay with me for a long time. I knew it was one of my favorites the moment I finished reading it and will be watching for more from the author. Highly recommended.
8. “The House of Old Marian” (FIYAH) by Albert Nkereuwem (Nigeria)
FIYAH Issue 30 posed a challenge to me. It contains three excellent African speculative fiction stories that are well worth your time “No Happy Endings for Chasers” by Uchechukwu Nwaka, “Not All Your Bones Are Yours” by Plangdi Neple and “The House of Old Marian” by Albert Nkereuwem, making it hard to choose between them. In the end I went with “The House of Old Marian”. Winner of the 2023 Dream Foundry Short Story Contest, this hard-hitting story about Afem, a necromancer with a chip on her shoulder who kills her father and ascends the throne of her fearsome clan, is a banger. The story throws us directly into the world and zips around in time, without any time to catch our breath as we learn the history of the world, its political power structures, and the many opposing forces struggling for ascendancy. Forces which Afem and her lesbian lover Heych must both come to terms with and struggle against. It’s a short but epic story full of intrigue, betrayals, schemes and closes with a blistering finale. Nkereuwem’s writing is effective here, with lovely, immersive worldbuilding, using elements of the real history and geology of Calabar to great effect. I’m not entirely sure what genre it is. Is it urban fantasy? I think so. But it doesn’t matter. It’s an excellent story.
9. “Godskin” (Strange Horizons) by CL Hellisen (South Africa)
I think CL Hellisen has a style. Lyrical, vivid and grounded writing in dark fantasy stories that have strong themes and frequently read like fairy tales for adults. “Godskin” is no exception. Set on an archipelago where most of the gods have died and their debris is scattered around the world while the islands are plagued by a phenomenon called “the Drift”, we meet Ishahn, a member of the fishing community in Yeske. Ishahn finds the hollow hand of a dead god and out of curiosity, wears it like a glove, granting her powers. We see as she slides into newfound godhood, comes to terms with her powers, navigates gender expectations, plots revenge against her aunt’s abusive husband and forges her own way in her strange and broken world. It’s a lovely, immersive story.
10. “We The People Excluding I” (Lightspeed Magazine) by Osahon Ize-Iyamu (Nigeria)
“The Wayward Children of Asase Yaa” (World Literature Today) by Cheryl Ntumy (Ghana)
Okay. Yes. It’s another tie. But what else do I do with two brilliantly written stories that are clear allegories, which both read like fables passed down through generations, that both explore the dynamics of sacrificing too much of yourself for family and community and both feature supernatural archetypal characters like the great mother, the wise giant and the trickster fox? Well, I put them together and ask you to check them out.
The first, “We The People Excluding I” is one of several excellent stories by Nigerian authors published in Lightspeed this year, a story of community, exploring what isolation as sacrifice for the greater good can mean. In the abstractly defined world of the story, things are unstable and falling apart. Our protagonist, a member of an unnamed collectivist society, is asked by their leader, the fox man, to exile themselves so that, “the world can be restored.” They do, but they come to discover that the fox man is not what he appears to be and their journey into exile is both far more perilous and far less helpful than they realized. They must find a way to fight the isolation, find a new community and end their pointless sacrifice. This reads brilliantly as a political allegory of what predatory and fascist leaders often do, scapegoating a person or a group in times of turmoil, as well as an interrogation of excessive self-sacrifice that corrodes rather than heals the community.
That excessive self-sacrifice is the central theme too in Ntumy’s “The Wayward Children of Asase Yaa” which I read as an allegory for humanity’s hyper-extractionist activities and its impact on the planet (Asase Yaa is the Akan goddess of fertility, love, and the earth). In the story, she is depicted as a mother of ravenous children who do nothing but sleep and eat, devouring her flesh and wounding her. Her sister goddesses notice her appearance and pity her, wondering how she can continue to bear such children. She goes through cycles with each birthing, with the children almost killing her, and even killing themselves until the final tragic end. It’s a harrowing story, written skillfully, that truly explores the consequences of Asase Yaa sacrifice-in-excess, without receiving love and care in return, made even more chilling by the realization that we are in fact, the wayward children in question.
So… those were my favorites. But there were many more (dozens!) I really liked or enjoyed which I just couldn’t mention.
What were yours? Any other great African speculative fiction stories from 2024 you’d recommend?
Till next year.
