Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

In Part Two, you’ll meet: a crime writer whose grandfather was a king—one who made a Western artist a priestess in the Ogun religion.

A white South African anti-apartheid activist whose sister was tried under the security laws—and introduced him to the work of Joanna Russ.

A Rastafarian from Zimbabwe whose experience of life under Mugabe has made him a free-market neo-liberal.

A South African rap/ jazz-rock star, illustrator, and author who models his look on the Wicked Witch of the West.

And I look at two or three books I consider to be stone cold masterpieces, just to answer the question why read African SF?

Part Two of the 100 African Writers of SFF series: Writers in the U.K.

Table of Contents:

Part Two: Africans in the UK

In 2009 visiting at Benue State University in Makurdi, Nigeria, I found in the university bookshop Famine in Heaven by Odo Stephen.

Two sisters, one Christian, one Muslim, lead the world into a feminist utopia. They travel in spacecraft to Venus, the Moon, and eventually heaven—but much of the book takes the form of philosophical debates.

The book was so unusual, so different from anything I’d read (except, oddly, some of the science fiction by Mark Twain) that I tried to find more African SFF. Looking at the spread of mobile telephones and cybercafés in Nigeria, I knew there had to be some.

I didn’t know it at the time, but already, in 2008, Chimurenga magazine in South Africa had published a special issue of science fiction by Africans, Dr. Satan’s Echo Chamber.

Going online in 2009 I found that someone was trying to get writers and architects to collaborate on a science fiction anthology. The collective was called Lagos 2060.

In the eight years since 2008, there has been an explosion of African fantasy and science fiction. AfroSF, the anthology edited by Ivor Hartmann, was published in 2013, beating Lagos 2060 to be the first book anthology in the current wave.

The explosion is partly explained by the rapid growth of the web and of smart phones. It is easier to publish and distribute online rather than by print and road, especially in Africa. Omenana is dependable, regular publication devoted to SFF. Brittle Paper publishes an impressive range of African writing, some of it speculative.

The development of Africa’s publishing industry from Kwani? in East Africa to companies like Kachifo Limited and Cassava Republic Press in West Africa began to provide Africa with its own, beautifully published books.

But that is only part of the story.

This is the hypothesis for now: conditions for African writers now resemble the conditions in the early 20th century that led to the USA taking over from Europe as the centre of science fiction and fantasy.

One of those conditions is diaspora.

Around the turn of the 20th century, the USA had two great diasporas at once.

From 1900 to 1920, one third of Americans left farms and moved to cities—often not the old established cities of the East Coast. This migration included a huge movement by African Americans out of rural poverty in the South. Black or white, people escaped rural life often by moving up the Mississippi River towards Chicago. Chicago drained the Midwest of geeks, misfits, bored farmers, musicians, actors, bootleggers, fantasists, religious lunatics, quacks, inventors, and ambitious people of all types.

It was in Chicago that L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900. It was where Frank Lloyd Wright invented much of how the future would look (and who had his office in the same building as Baum). Edgar Rice Burroughs was a pencil salesman in Oak Park, Chicago when he wrote and sold his first story, “A Princess of Mars,” in 1912. It was in Chicago that the skyscraper and the elevated railway, urban blues, and northern jazz were developed—not New York.

The other great diaspora, at the same time, was the second wave of migrants from Europe. From 1892 to 1952, 12 million immigrants from Europe arrived through one immigration centre: Ellis Island near New York. The peak year of European immigration was in 1907, when 1,285,349 persons entered the country. By 1910, 13.5 million immigrants from Europe were living in the United States. Laws against immigration by Chinese or black people limited numbers from other continents.

These migrants, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe, found themselves in a country that could be hostile. They faced linguistic challenge, religious bigotry, cultural difference, and economic hardship. They did menial jobs to pay for their children’s education. Some of the children of this diaspora would number among the greatest contributors to American fantasy, from Superman to the Laws of Robotics.

Diasporas are a geographical break, certainly. But their main power is that they are also a break from a past, specifically a past culture.

America’s move to the big city meant two different cultural breaks. The first was with frontier values, the culture of the independent homestead where you made your own shoes—rather like Dorothy leaving the lonely Kansas farm and tripping to the Emerald City. The second break was with small town values, the decency enforced by constant surveillance—like Superman leaving Smallville (also, in the current continuity, in Kansas). Metropolis is most often identified as being Chicago.

Cities offered anonymity, freedom, opportunity and, curiously, a new kind of interdependence. You were alone but in a crowd. You could work in a range of specialist jobs, get any kind of service or entertainment you wanted, and have sex with a new range of people.

The European diaspora meant that second generation immigrants were, like Clark Kent, passing as mainstream Americans while nursing another identity based on a faraway kingdom, a lost past.

Science fiction and fantasy are rooted in a habit of mind that loves to see dreams made flesh and reality re-imagined. One reaches out to the future, the other looks towards a past, but I would say both come from a similar impulse. F and SF walk hand in hand.

A break with old culture opens up new possibilities in the present and for the future. Diasporans often dream of a better personal future, and it’s a short step to dream of other futures for everyone else. The loss of culture draws the gaze backwards in time, to other values.

Diasporas make you the Other. You know better what it is like to be an alien.

Your language, your dress, your food, and your religion—everything about you is strange, at least to these Others who now have power. Perhaps you begin to see yourself though their eyes, develop a cultural double vision. You modify, perhaps, how you dress, speak, write or wear your hair. You might change how you spell your name, or call yourself a name they can pronounce. You see the old country in a new light. Or you value all over again the things you have lost and have had to move away from, be they church socials in Smallville or orthodox religion in Minsk.

You know that change is possible; real change, changes that make you wonder what it is to be human.

So you begin to write traditional belief fiction, stories based on fairy tales from the old country. You rewrite Alice in Wonderland for American audiences. You begin to write stories of the future when you are better off, or the world has progressed.

I don’t think I need to belabour parallels with possible experiences of Africans in diaspora.

By diaspora I mean different things. I mean Africans who have moved permanently to the West and their children who were born there. I also mean those now temporarily in the UK for an education, or to make some money. I do mean those who had to leave for their own safety, as well.

One thing I have noticed. The work of Africans who are now in the UK or in the West is of immense relevance to Africa, dealing with African themes. Richard Oduor Oduku, who we spoke to in Part One, talks about how much Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu means to him. Tade Thompson in this section tries to account for why so many top flight African women writers are, to some degree, diasporan.

There is a sense that diasporan writers speak for all Africans. And this is because, I think, all Africans are in diaspora—in this sense:

If diaspora means a cultural break, then all Africans at home or abroad have gone through a situation in which their country has moved from them, not them from it.

In Part One, Kiprop Kimutai talked about how it has only been three generations since his family were living a traditional life, and speaking their own mother tongue.

Colonialism, and then internalized colonialism, both have wrenched African cultures away from home without the people having to physically move. Globalization, new technology, new media continue to do the same. This is a different kind of scattering, but a scattering all the same.

Tendai Huchu in the last line of the last interview of this section says, “… there is nothing special here.” The surprise for many Africans coming to the West is that there is no surprise.

Africans for generations have been educated in Western languages and on Western models. Ordinary African homes have widescreen TVs, DVD players, and fridge freezers. The internet and smartphones mean that their children have access to YouTube, iTunes, social media, and e-books. In terms of youth culture, at least, there is not that much of a difference between life in or out of the diaspora.

And that internal cultural diaspora, that break with past, may well explain why so many Africans now are turning towards traditional beliefs and stories, or looking ahead with excitement to the future, and why there is such a cultural continuity between writers in and out of Africa.

In other words, this other scattering of culture helps explain the rise of SFF and speculative fiction inside Africa as well.

For Chikodili Emelumadu coming back to Britain was such a disappointment that she returned to her Igbo cultural inheritance.

For others such as Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor the West means increased opportunity to question gender and sex roles. But as we have seen in Part One of this series, this is happening as well within Africa, despite opposition.

First, we meet Ayodele Arigbabu, one of the founding fathers of African science fiction; literally an architect of the future.

Ayodele Arigbabu

A hundred and fifty years since he had ascended to the summit of the mountain, the old man returned to find the village still in chaos. Different armed patrols from different warring factions stopped him and had him frisked. They found nothing, save his loin cloth and walking stick. Then one bright lad recognised him and raised the alarm. “The old man is back!” The news took on a life of its own. Within an hour, all the people had gathered in the square. The men were there with their weapons, but nobody was killing anybody at the moment, the women came a bit later with their children in tow; approaching cautiously in case it was a ruse. When the old man was sure he had an audience, he cleared his throat and addressed them in a thin voice. “For several moons, even long before some of your fathers were born, I stayed at the mountain top seeking an end to our problems. Today I return with an answer but fear it might be too late; perhaps there is no point in telling you.” The crowd shouted in unison: Tell us, old man! The old man shrugged and moved the crowd back to create more space in the center, then he drew several groups of characters in the sand and gathered his loin cloth around his waist in preparation to leave. “What does it all mean?” The crowd asked in panic when it seemed he would leave without interpreting the strange signs. He paused and responded in his thin voice. “It is a complex mathematical equation you must all resolve together in teams using algebra, calculus and chaos theory.” The bright lad came forward again. “We don’t know these things, we’ve been fighting for one hundred and fifty years, and nobody has had much time for learning.” The old man frowned, drew the lad close and placed a wrinkled hand on his shoulder. “Son,” he said slowly, “now might be a good time to learn.”

—“Set Theory” from A Fistful of Tales

Ayodele Arigbabu is one of the founding fathers of the current wave of African SFF, the person who pulled together the Lagos 2060 collective and published the resulting anthology.

Ayodele is now as much a professional futurist as he is a working architect, publisher, illustrator, and author. He is in the UK to do a Masters in Creative Technology, but has a long career in many fields.

His short story “You Live to Die Once” won the 2001 Liberty Bank Short Stories Prize; his poem Livelihood got an honorable mention at the 2003 Muson Poetry competition. His stage play Moremi: The Legend Retold was staged in December 2003 at the University of Lagos Main Auditorium to an appreciative audience, and went on to be performed in Oklahoma and at the National Theatre of Nigeria.

Ayodele: “Moremi is an actual legend retold, from Yoruba folklore. A pre-eminent Nigerian dramatist called Duro Ladipo had a very good run with his adaptation of Moremi in the 1960s.

“A friend of mine—Sewedo Nupowaku—inspired my adaptation. We ran a media company together at the time. We were and still are very keen on comics, and this influenced how the play was written.” You can read Sewedo and Ayodele’s thoughts about comics at the time here.

Ayodele: “We had this great ambition of Disney-fying African legends, taking the stories we grew up with, tales told by our parents about the tortoise, re-reading the folklore.

But at same time we were seeing Disney movies and watching cartoons. We saw Voltron, Terrahawks, Thunder Sub, G Force, and Speed Racer. TV stations didn’t start till 4 PM with cartoons, so we’d get back from school, catch the three or four hours of cartoons before stuff for adults came on—a regular staple for people of my generation. We grew up on that Western storytelling, and aspired to it, but our myths and legends were also part of us.

Naturally Sewedo wanted to do a Lion King/ Pocahontas with Moremi. Someone else had started scripting a Moremi comic book. Sewedo asked me to do it as a stage play, so I took the characters, did my own research, went to town with it. We took the legend, stayed true to the idea, but took liberties with it.

Moremi was the wife of a previous king of Ife, a warrior king. She was well respected. But the new king was a weakling, who allowed people to be taken advantage of Ife. Moremi stood up for the people. Marauders were taking people as slaves. So the way we put the story was that the marauders’ land was barren, and the only way to survive was to raid Ife, a historical town, the city in the origins of Yorubaland—ironical that Ife had a history of military might but was now so helpless. The raiders appeared like spirit beings and the people of Ife were too scared. Moremi met a river goddess and bargained for support. The Goddess would help—but Moremi had to sacrifice her only son.

In the play, we had rap battles, martial arts choreography, a village priest consulting the gods by cellphone—he had a very poor connection. We took liberties with the gods, got lots of laughs.”

The play has had several productions, the most recent being in 2013. See the YouTube trailer with comments by the chairman of Etisalat communications and his wife.

“I did script a complete comic series for Moremi and we did a preview comic. Ultimately, we would have wanted to have it animated.”

Even then he wanted to get into animation, but in 2008, he set up DADA Books.

“I created DADA to publish my own anthology, A Fistful of Tales, but two other books happened first. The first was by the person who encouraged me to start DADA, Jumoke Verissimo. The title of her poetry collection was I am memory.

The second was The Abyssinian Boy by Onyeka Nwelue, a novel about a child born of an Indian father and a Nigerian mother and inspired by Salman Rushdie, using elements of magic realism. It is set in Delhi as well as Nigeria. It went on to win the T.M. Aluko Prize for first book of fiction.

At sixteen Onyeka had moved from Lagos to Delhi to research the novel—very ambitious. An Indian lady put him up. He really wanted to be a writer. I was very impressed with him; he had a story he wanted to tell. Since then he has taught a university course in African literature, taught in Mexico, and promotes jazz concerts in different embassies in Nigeria.”

Read a blog post by Nwelue about his travels to India with the great Wole Soyinka.

“The name DADA was a slight nod to Dadaism, which I connect with as an architect, that level of being upside down and asking questions about what do you call art. At the same time Dada is a word in Yoruba culture that refers to people born with dreadlocks. Locked hair has a spiritual connotation, so such people don’t cut their hair. The whole Rasta culture—“me against the man thing” —also came into the title.

DADA is all but run down now. I have to figure how to put life back into it. Still keep getting emails from people asking if they can send manuscripts.”

In 2009 Ayo finally published A Fistful of Tales.

“The stories came out of a creative writing program funded by the British Council called Crossing Borders that paired writers with mentors. Liz Jensen was my mentor. We would write by email, with her sending me comments. Such a pleasure to work with her. She does SF kind of stuff too, so she was comfortable with what I was doing.”

The story “Warp” starts with a time warp, then traps the narrator with a mad taxi driver who claims to have revised modern physics using Yoruba folklore and developed a plasma drive…which means unexpectedly, that the car can fly.

“My Superhero Story” will appeal to SFF geeks—it’s about the gap between our fantasy culture and our actual lives. “The X12 Moonshade” is about a 15th century Japanese lamp that is also a spying device.

The stories were profusely illustrated by David Orimolade and Boma Nnaji, who also took part in the Lagos 2060 workshops.

Ayodele: “I didn’t consciously set out to say I am writing Science Fiction. At that point I wasn’t thinking in that frame of mind. I was just telling stories that came naturally to me. The book came out in 2009 but I’d written most of the stories in in 2006.

There were earlier anthologies that had SFF and magical elements in stories. I remember Jazz and Palm Wine was an anthology out from Longman’s that came out in the early 80s.

In 2012 the Goethe Institut funded an exhibition on the Nigerian National Theater called The Pop-up Theatre. My contribution was an online comic. A guy and a girl playing around the National Theatre found an exo-suit designed by a professor and abandoned there after the prof died in suspicious circumstances. In the story, they crowdsource, asking people to key in data to unlock the suit. In the real world we asked people to answer questions on the National Theatre to unlock it. A fun project. I used 3D software to create the scenes, the character poses, and to render the artwork for each panel.”

The Pop Up Theatre Naijroid is available online to read.

“In 2014, I was commissioned by the Heinrich Boll Foundation to create an illustrated story which I called “My City Safari,” as the first part of what I planned to be a series of illustrated stories.

“In the series, a young girl would visit cities and experience them in different ways. She’s from Makoko, a community that lives in houses on stilts on the Lagos Lagoon.

“I set out to do a comic about the Eko Atlantic City to address some of the concerns about the sustainability and social inclusiveness of the project, issues central to Heinrich Boll Foundation’s advocacy and I chose to do it through the subtle means of a child’s curious engagement with urban design and the internet of things.” Read the full 76-page comic here.

“Eko Atlantic City is being built as a gated district of Lagos, not open to everybody.

“It is better known as the Great Wall of Lagos, but it’s a bit more like the artificial island in Dubai, with sand filling in a stretch of the Atlantic about 1.5 times the size of Victoria Island—a brilliant idea for pushing back coastal erosion and gaining some real estate in the process but everyone is concerned about its impact.

“The Lagos shoreline had been eroded over at least a hundred years, so a popular beach in Lagos had virtually disappeared and a road from Victoria to Lekki was being eaten away. The solution was not just to build a protective wall to stop the erosion. The state decided to push back the ocean to the original shoreline and THEN build the wall. Being a capitalist state, it realized they were making new real estate, a new city. New towers are already filling about half of Eko Atlantic. There are problems with equality. Properties are being bought by multinationals and the super rich.

“As an architect I am in involved with advocacy issues. Who is Eko Atlantic really for? Who will benefit? Will investment all go to infrastructure to be used by the rich?”

Ayodele is an architect by profession. When I visited in 2015, he took me on a tour of the banks, condominiums, and car show rooms he had designed, mostly along the Lekki peninsula—mile on mile of new developments, prosperous and fresh looking.

As a student he was part of the team led by Theo Lawson who designed Freedom Park, one of my favorite things about Lagos. The old colonial prison has been redeveloped as an arts center with a theatre, an outdoor live music venue, a row of restaurants in the old prisoner’s mess, and an upstairs bar where artists, writers and musicians meet. Admission including live music was less than an English pound. Click here to read more about Freedom Park.

It was his interest in the social implications of architecture that led to Lagos 2060, a collaboration of architecture and fiction.

“WHAT made me do it? Restlessness? Part of it was trying to bring different worlds together—architecture, publishing, and literature.

“Ideologically, one feels that architecture has a lot to contribute to the well-being of society in several different ways. I knew not many writers were engaging with ideas of science fiction, or rather not doing it seriously enough. I was one of the presidents of a campus writers group, which exposed me to fresh talent. So the anthology was fresh talent for the sake of fresh talent. In those days, you couldn’t imagine a career as a writer. Achebe and Soyinka were too far away and we didn’t have Adichie then. This was just artistic endeavor for the sake of it.”

Lagos 2060 is one of the earliest efforts to publish African SFF—work began on the project in 2009. To be ruthlessly honest, it reads like a foundation text for a new field finding its feet, with authors who had no context for science fiction or access to discussions about it. His fellow architects who were supposed to collaborate with the authors withdrew, and the writers needed encouragement. The authors were by and large mainstream writers or journalists. See the About box “Lagos 2060: the writers” at the end of this interview.

But the anthology was a seed. One of the contributors, Chiagozie Fred Nwonwu, became one of the founders and editors of the crucial online SFF magazine Omenana.

“Lagos 2060 also had a utilitarian ambition, which goes against the grain of what art should be, but what art has been in Africa. It tends to be utilitarian; we want to see a use for it. Lagos 2060 was supposed to be a tool for scenario planning, meaning you envision the future and create scenarios of what could happen. You use it as a means for planning the future… help it happen, stop it happening, preparing.”

Workshops for the anthology were held in 2010.

“I was very conscious of not prescribing to the authors what to write. We brainstormed and threw ideas around, some of the things I was toying with made it through into the stories but I didn’t force it down their throats, I wanted to see the writers own writing. I was the main architectural collaborator. But Boma Nnaji, an architect friend, and one of the illustrators of Fistful also came in to the brainstorming.

“The problem of a country like Nigeria is not corruption, but lack of imagination, not yet being able to envision the kind of future that we want. We have not pushed ourselves even to say that by 2020 we will have 12G broadband even in remotest village. We are not saying okay, if the autonomous car is being made now, put people into engineering school now to design road networks for them.”

Lagos 2060 was finally published by DADA in 2013.

“I took copies of Lagos 2060 and walked through all the state secretariats and seats of government, including the Governor’s office and his commissioners. A dumb thing to do, just going in to dump it. I just felt it was something necessary to do.”

Ayodele continues to lobby, ponder, illustrate and write. In 2015, NESTA, a British Science and Culture NGO, invited him to Britain their event FutureFest 2015 to speak about the future of Lagos as a city. British immigration processes meant that he was not given a visa in time to get to the panel, and the rest of us on the panel had to do it without him.

NESTA did, however, show his video, made together with iMagineering Lagos, the collective that emerged for the purpose—which is extraordinary. It starts out with real talking heads from Lagos now, but turns into a series of video reports from the Lagos Herald. These amount to animated tales from the future. You can see the video on YouTube by clicking here.

NESTA also recently commissioned a story “The Facility” from him about AI and the expected singularity to be published in parts. You can read it on TheLong+Short website.

“In 2010, the first time I came to UK, I had ambitions to do another degree to bring my interests in media and design together. In 2015, I decided to give Middlesex University a shot, and happily they took me. The Course Director interviewed me over Skype and warned me that there would be a lot of programming and asked if I have the stomach for it. I said yes, I can program in C# and JavaScript.

“So I came back to the UK to study in October 2015 and I am just finishing the MSc in Creative Technology—a perfect program for someone in SFF. It looks at what’s new, what’s established in technology and what new things you can do with it. I did research on the history of digital TV, looked at the first devices for VR, at Disney creating the multiplane camera for animation. I am playing with the Internet of things and human/computer interface, amongst other things.

“The course meant that my experience of writing the story for NESTA was a bit different. I was writing as someone a bit more involved with the technology, I wasn’t just winging it.”

Talking to Ayodele, I get the impression that new thinking about science, technology, business, and creativity is a feature of Nigerian discourse. The contrast with East Africa with its amiable bohemianism, literary taste, and linguistic radicalism is stark. Ayodele is not the only Nigerian writer or academic or health worker I’ve spoken to who has a great awareness of branding, business, economics, and banking. He is not the only person to say that Nigerians like their art to have a function, be it teaching a moral, illustrating how to run a business, or building for the future.

“I will be doing more writing and also make science fiction animated shorts. There is a lot of quality work being done in Nigeria by people going to India or the UK to study, like Eri Umusu, who’s done a demo for a series called “The Sim” about robots and martial arts.

“Even more is happening with gaming in Nigeria because you can monetarize it more easily. Not a lot of SFF in our gaming yet; it’s targeting the mainstream—games by Nigerians for Nigerians. If successful, gaming will spawn animated clips as trailers or standalone movies and some of those are bound to have SFF elements. So I’m interested in gaming and how that can be a quick point of entry into the world of technology for young Nigerians.

“I’m also looking at working with Ore Disu, who was part of the NESTA panel with us, and Yegwa Ukpo on creating a space for the sort of conversation that birthed Lagos 2060 to keep happening. Ore runs an NGO called the Nsibidi Institute. The name Nsibibi comes from the name for a native African writing system. Her NGO does culture-related programs and urbanism-related events, preserving learning about alternative culture and futurism.

“Ore, Yegwa and I want to get together to share ideas and competencies. We will do a series of discussions in Lagos, called Alternatives and an online version of it.”

Read the Nsibidi Institute webpage.

“Yegwa Ukpo runs a practical space called Stranger Lagos which provides coffee, a chance to think, and structures for collaboration. He’s into all kinds of stuff, including the blockchain technology behind the bitcoin, and is trying to create an alternative currency.”

Visit the Stranger Lagos website.

“Until recently Nigeria was the biggest consumer of champagne in the world—yet with poor roads and no electricity but still with the third highest number of dollar millionaires in Africa and 68% of its population living below the poverty line.

“We laugh when Forbes’ list only shows three Nigerians. They are only the ones Forbes knows about. The rest are hidden in Swiss bank accounts. But we didn’t laugh when David Cameron said we are ‘fantastically corrupt,’ when the British Museum has our Benin Bronzes and our corrupt officials are laundering their money in British banks. We learned corruption from the British.

“Nigeria is the country where capitalism ran wild, set free by colonialism. The result is like nowhere else on earth.

“The government is very effective at projects like Eko Atlantic City, but the hospital where my Dad lectured for over 40 years is a shadow of what it used to be. The operating theatre when I was going to school was one of the best in Africa. Now we hear stories of operations when electricity goes off and the procedures are concluded using mobile phones for light. And that’s in Lagos, which is doing better than most Nigerian cities.”

Ayodele’s father is a neurosurgeon, his mum a nurse, and his two brothers are doing final exams in different branches of medicine, while another brother is working in a bank. Two older sisters are also doctors and a younger sister is an IT specialist in Sheffield. At the end of his course in the UK, he will go home.

“This is the worst time to go back to Nigeria. It’s in recession, a sharp drop in GDP due to low oil prices and poor economic policies. The entertainment sector will be OK; can even grow in a downturn. It doesn’t depend on oil.

“Selling oil at less than 40 dollars, we don’t have money to pay what’s called fuel subsidy any longer and anyway people weren’t getting it before because fuel was not sold at the official rate. So what did most Nigerians get out of the oil?

“This government can get some infrastructure built, but there’s little confidence in their ability to manage the economy, and you can’t build without an economy, you can only borrow. You are building a banana republic, leaving a legacy of fancy things behind but leaving people poor. We’re building with borrowed money and that’s like suicide for our children.

“Why are we not innovating? Where is our intellectual property? We need to drive the process—right now we are waiting for America to tell us what to make, but America wants to restructure and begin manufacturing again. One of the most innovative people in Nigeria thinks we can become a manufacturing hub like China. But that model just ended.

“Some of my friends say I am in diaspora, and scare-mongering. The stereotype is that diaspora people always think nothing works and are talking down at everyone while not being in touch with what is going on. I used to say the same thing, make jokes about diaspora people. But how do they get their news in Nigeria? From Nigerian newspapers, from Twitter, from Facebook, from blogs? Same as I do. I still live in Lagos, at least in my head. I’m just in London studying. I will go back. I am not in diaspora.”

Visit the Dada Books website.

About Lagos 2060

The contributors since, according to Ayodele:

Afolabi Muheez Ashiru

…has continued to write SFF, focusing on a comics series, Tales of Conquest working with USA-based artist Scot Mmobuosi. It’s still not out, but a preview is available here.

Okey Egboluche

…when he contributed to the anthology, Okey was both a journalist and mainstream fiction writer for Author Me, AfricanWriter.com, and Author’s Den. Recently he had a mainstream story “Cash Money” published online by Brittle Paper.

Chiagozie Fred Nwonwu

…had been doing a lot of SF before Lagos 2060. He was probably the most committed to SFF. He’s gone on to found with Chinelo Onwualu the online magazine Omenana and to publish many stories. Read one of them, “Deletion” in Saraba magazine.

Kofo Akib

I’ve not seen anything from her. I don’t know if she’s done a lot of writing. We are friends on Facebook, but I haven’t seen her post about any writing…I found what I thought was her page under a slightly different name.

Adebola Rayo

…went on to become a speechwriter for Fashola (probably the most successful mayor Lagos has ever had) and was a member of the Pen Circle as well. Not seen much of her work since then.

Terh Agbedeh

…was a journalist, for a local paper. I am sure he has written more fiction and some SFF as well. I know he is a member of the African Fantasy Reading Group on Facebook, where he publishes a lot of micropoetry. He tells us he is working on a new science fiction story.

Temitayo Olofinlua

…I collaborated with her on African Futures, a three-city event funded by the Goethe Institut in 2015. She did a story that I curated set in a place in Lagos called computer village where you get hardware and parts. She re-imagined it in the future. We thought it up like a game—three narratives, three different people. Their narratives get conjoined at one point.

Chikodili Emelumadu

In one town like this, not too long ago, lived an enterprising young girl. Ugonwoma, her parents called her, as she was the pride of their lives. She was so rich that she built a house in the village for her retired parents before any of her brothers could say taa! and painted it white so that under the sun it was like staring into the flare from a welder’s torch. People would use the house as a landmark in the village: “Take right until you come to the white house,” which made her parents very happy. Her mother wore the latest cloth in the market and held her head high, for her daughter was young – had just finished university, in fact – and was doing strong things. Her father bought himself an ozo title; one could hear him laughing kwa-kwa-kwa as he sat with his friends on the veranda of his new house, drinking palm wine and eating bush meat, flicking flies with his horsetail whisk. Yes-men and boy-boys would sing his praise names from the compound below and he would get up to spray naira notes on them like manna. Life was good.

—From “Story, Story: A Tale Of Mothers And Daughters”

From the title on, “Story Story” starts out like a family-told tale, the equivalent of “once upon a time.” It stands back from a Western reader, who is asked to work out things from context. What is an ozo title?

A Westerner might wonder if the writing is exaggerating or even makes things a bit exotic? “…drinking palm wine and eating bush meat, flicking flies with a horsetail whisk” seems to echo Tutuola, and that horsetail whisk feels like it could be from the colonial era. Those elements could set the story in the past, until they collide with the daughter going to university.

“Story Story” signals that it is drawing on traditional belief and storytelling but is set in the modern world. Chikodili Emelumadu, the author, has lived back and forth between England and Nigeria all her life. She was born in Worksop in Nottinghamshire, and then moved back to Nigeria at age two and a half. She shows that use of local languages is a concern for some West African as well as East African writers.

Chikodili says, “‘Story Story’ was written in a purposeful style, basically a transliteration of how it would be told in Igbo as my grandmother or my mother would tell it, to get the cadence of it echoing oral storytelling.” Later she adds, “But exotic? No. Palm wine is still the traditional drink of hospitality, we still enjoy bush meat with a passion and as far as I know, flies haven’t gone extinct in my country.

“I usually let each story have its own voice. I’m finishing up a novel now. One of the narrators in it is a housemaid sent out to work by her parents to bring in extra income. She is comfortable telling the story—‘gisting’ as we say in Nigeria—and she tells it in a voice that is a bit like ‘Story Story.’

“The novel’s working title is As I Was Saying…but that might change. It’s speculative fiction. I found that with the first draft some literary elements, though carried by the characters, didn’t seem to go anywhere. There is a curse/gift passed down through the family of another character and things happen that trigger it.

“I’m very interested in ancestry and how little of it most of us know. We have lost the art of asking questions, I find. Our parents were encouraged to forgo certain practices in order to be “civilized,” to be able to mingle with a world brought to their doorsteps by missionaries and early educationists. There were some harmful practices, yes, but it all got lumped together with benign and even beneficial customs.

“For example, ancestral reverence, which is a big deal where I come from. In the old days and in certain parts of Igboland still, people will call upon their ancestors for guidance. It has spiritual connotations of course, but on the other hand, if you don’t tell stories and sing songs with the names of ancestry you will forget who they are.

“This girl, my character, knows just three generations of her family, but the gift links her with generations gone before.

“She finds out how much of her ancestry is present in her, but also how much she is a conduit for things that happened in the past she has no idea about. Spirits don’t forget. They have nothing but time.

“The novel has two narrators, maybe three. At different points, different people wanted to speak so they took over the narration. I might choose to let that be, or I might hack them all off in rewrites. Kill all my darlings.

“The first is the nanny/house help. She is not literate having come from a farming community. Narrator two is my girl who is the conduit of ancestors. I don’t want to tell you who the third person is, in case I kill him. Suffice to say, right now he is a schoolmate of the girl. And no, he is not a ‘love interest’.”

So how has Chikodili found life in the UK?

Chikodili: “Moving to London, I found my culture was presented as an otherness. That made me want to reconcile with it. I wanted to go deeper into my culture and find out things which people at home—for fear of Christianity or whatever—might not wish to talk about.

“Reincarnation is part of the Igbo tradition and religion. In none of the foreign religions (that are prevalent in Nigeria) is that allowed. You die, you go to heaven or hell. If you’re Catholic, there is the hope of purgatory if anyone cares enough about to you dedicate rosary hours to praying you out of it.

“The Igbo pre-colonial relationship with death has been disturbed. We had good deaths—old age. We had bad deaths from illness, the ogbanje phenomenon where children died early and frequently to torture their parents; and we had hard deaths—accidents, murder.

“But death was not the end. It was like another plane. You passed through and were…recycled, for lack of a better word. Now we fear death. We don’t give people death names any more. We have absorbed the Christian idea of death.”

Chikokili did not speak Igbo for a while—her first language was English. At home, she was made to speak English all the time.

“But I learned Igbo gradually. I speak Igbo very well, can read it slowly and write in ‘Central Igbo’ which is like the Igbo lingua franca. However, in everyday conversation, I prefer my dialect. Sometimes, it becomes even more casual than that, the sort you’d use when speaking to a friend or an age-mate, a mix we call Ingli-Igbo.

“So if I were to come into a friend’s house and they were eating they might say to me, ‘your legs are fine.’ That means your legs are good luck. You’ve come at the right time to have some food, so join us. ‘She picked up running’ means ‘She started to run’.”

Chikodili’s family moved from the UK to the town of Awka in Ananabra State, not her family’s hometown, which is Oba. Her first secondary school in Imo state provided some background for her novel. She then went to the Federal Government Girl’s School in Onitsha.

“I always thought I was going to be a writer. I thought everybody was a writer, that everybody had pictures in their head and reams of plot. I worked at being a writer for a very long time. I started writing plays when I was about six.”

Like so many parents, the family seem to have demanded achievement and hard work from their children.

“My Dad made us work on the farm. He grew up poor so we had to learn to do things for ourselves. My parents made us read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, which had little plays in the back. So I started to write plays. In my teenage years I wrote poems and attempted novels.”

Chikodili studied English Language and Literature at Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Awka, then came to the UK in 2004 to study for a Master’s degree in Cross Cultural Communication and International Relations at the University of Newcastle. After a concentrated education in English literature, Chikodili found Britain a culture shock.

Chikodili: “My parents were anglophiles, so I had to read the classics; swashbuckling explorers on ‘the dark continent,’ tea and scones and cucumber sandwiches, that sort of thing. It was a bit of a shock coming to Britain to see that people weren’t that proper anymore.

They spat on the streets and smashed each other’s heads open on Friday nights after downing a couple of drinks. It was a bit too Dickensian and not quite as my father had brought us up to conduct ourselves. That probably sounds snooty but I’m sure some people can relate to those expectations our parents had. It’s almost as if they had to be ultra-British to ‘pass,’ as it were.

“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 of for granted. I had to figure out what I wanted to be in myself.”

She followed her MA with a postgrad diploma in Journalism at Harlow College. Afterwards, she spent time working as a journalist for the BBC World Service.

“I quit the BBC at 27 and went into short stories. I practiced using the skills of journalism in fiction, being concise, writing to length.”

She began submitting fiction in October 2013 has had a run of publications since in Running out of Ink, Omenana, Apex and others. Her story “Candy Girl” was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award in 2015. Her most recent story “Soursop” was published in Apex in 2016.

For me, “Soursop” is completely different from “Story, Story.” It’s set in a joyless, post-human world. The rich have all migrated, stripping the Earth—what’s left is a wasteland where nothing grows. The taste of food exists only as other people’s memories, sold to a planet-bound workforce. The language instead of a flavorful brew of Nigerian expressions, mimics its world—techno and militaristic.

It’s undoubtedly science fiction, perhaps too crowded with backstory, but an effective dream image of Nigeria now.

Chikodili: “Right now in Nigeria, the tomato crop has failed. We don’t have proper infrastructure to transport tomatoes. We don’t even can them. So if they are not in season, we don’t have them. ‘Soursop’ is a bit of a fantasy about how there is no food.

“My parents are still in Nigeria, so the state of the country worries me. I worry at some point that the currency will become useless. ‘Soursop’ is a nightmare of stripping Nigeria in which the rich are Ascendant, meaning they leave the ground to live in space colonies. The heroine of the story, being the granddaughter of a rebel is condemned to work, working for nothing.

“Nigerians tend to be complacent. The Arab Spring, we just don’t have that. There is no sense of a coming together for the common good. There are more than 200 languages and as many dialects. It’s easy for those in charge to divide people against each other and let them fight for scraps; perceived territory, resources, whatever. And while we fight, they loot.”

When we spoke, the UK was about to lose Chikodili. Since 2006, she has been an enthusiastic blogger, and she met her future husband through blogging. He recently got a fellowship at Harvard, so the family, including Chikodili’s son, now live in Cambridge, MA.

“I am not completely gone from Nigeria though just now I’m being bombarded by newness. My son really wants to go back to Nigeria.”

Why does she think SFF has taken off in Africa?

Chikodili: “It’s a silly question: why is Africa reading Science Fiction? What does that mean? Science fiction is just a way of inventing new ways of living or doing things.

“African writers are just like you—only better… naw just joking. We have the same concerns, we have to eat, and we worry about money, children, and good health. The ways we are different are not a threat.

“Life sucks. So SF allows you not to be in life anymore. I don’t understand how people can stand not living in all possible futures, why they get stuck in their existence—bill paying, car tax, wheel-clamping. SF not only gives you a glimpse of an alternate reality but a future one. Even when I’ve shut a book, my psyche keeps thinking it over. When I started submitting, I was worried about my stuff and having it be ‘professional’ or ‘normal.’ Now I am over worrying about if I sound crazy, I just don’t care anymore.

“The kind of mainstream literature that was winning awards—child abuse, slavery, domestic violence, FGM, child soldiers, poverty, rape, HIV. That was Africa. People are so entrenched in their view of what is African that they can’t reconcile a story about people sitting in a café. It’s not African enough, they say. And that influences the way writers think about their work. I am through feeling guilty that my version of African is so different from everyone else’s.

“A lot of us science fiction types, it’s our duty to do what SF and Fantasy do—which is not conform to any norm, just break the rules, write and say what you want in any form. There is a resurgence in speculative fiction right now because literary forms are not working for us. It seems a lot more people are writing a speculative fiction element. Writing should come from a place of rebellion.

“But don’t listen to me. Just do it.”

Others stories by Chikodili Emelumadu available online:

Ezeiyoke Chukwunonso

Uncle Odinaka was sitting at a white plastic seat under the shade of an udara tree near the trunk. He cupped his snuff on his right palm, and with his left, he tapped it to sniff. He would sneeze and some of the brownish droplets from it would spread on his white singlet. I called the color of the singlet white because I knew when it had been that color, when Mum bought it for him as a gift. What remained of it now was something yet to have a proper name of its own. Sometimes he would use the edge of the yellow wrapper that tied across his waist to cleanup his streaming nose. Dad parked a stone’s throw from the udara tree where Odinaka sat. As he turned the engine off, I knew what he would say. “Don’t eat anything from anybody except the ones I approve and don’t shake hands with any of them.” I never knew at what point this ritual began, but what I could recall was that since Ebuka, my eldest brother, died, Dad suspected that my mother’s uncles killed him and would always give me this instruction if I travelled to my mother’s home with him. We walked towards Uncle Odinaka. When he saw us coming, he stood up and started coming towards us. I realized why Mum used him as an adage whenever she felt that we weren’t eating as we ought to. “Do you want to be like a single ‘I’ like your Uncle Odinaka?” she would say. And truly, Odinaka looked like an ‘I’ with a flat stomach and bottom. He looked like a strong Sahara wind could blow him away. From his gestures, I knew that he wanted to hug Dad as he did to Mum whenever I came with her, but Dad just smiled, standing away from him. Dad tucked his palms in the pockets of his white kaftan. Odinaka understood Dad’s gesture, so he withdrew. But I went near him and hugged him just the way Mum used to do. I knew that if the eyes were a sword, Dad would have slain me. I tried as much as I could to avoid his eyes. It was then that I told Uncle Odinaka that I was tired and needed some rest. He gave me the key to his house. I thanked him. Without looking at my father, I left them still standing under the tree.

—“The Eaters Of Flesh” from Lost Tales from the Mountain: Halloween Anthology Vol. II Edited by: Abigail Kern & Riley Guyer) and reprinted in Haunted Grave and Other Stories

The real horror in Ezeiyoke Chukwunonso’s story doesn’t lie so much in that the young hero’s family are involved in evil magic, but that he can’t tell which parent it is—or possibly both and the wider family as well.

His mother has disappeared; his father says that religion had driven her to madness, but her family blame him. Did his uncles kill his brother? Or was it his own father sacrificing his first-born? The hero can never know. The story powerfully communicates what it’s like to be in a dysfunctional family.

The story is published in a horror anthology, though I would call it a piece of traditional belief realism. The focus is not so much on the magic as the sense of paranoia and denunciation of each other by every part of the family—a nightmare of threat and doubt.

When I came out of the house, Dad was still under the udara tree. About fifteen other extended relatives sat with him in a circle. From where I stood in front of Odinaka’s bungalow, I couldn’t make out what the discussion was about. The way Nna, my mother’s nephew, who looked like a scarecrow, was speaking and was swinging his right hand up and down and sometimes pointing an accusing finger at my father showed me that whatever it was, it wasn’t funny. Toochi, Odinaka’s younger brother, sitting on Nna’s left, would sometimes shake his head. Odinaka sat on Nna’s right, using his two palms intermittently to give Nna a gesture of calming down. I looked away…. My eyes went back to the udara tree. Virtually everybody there was standing up. I think my father was in the middle because I couldn’t see him. Whatever led to the present situation I couldn’t tell but I was certain that if nothing was done, my father’s safety was in danger. I walked over. Immediately when they saw me, the commotion began to calm. Chidi, Ejike, Mmadu and Ude, the elderly older cousins of my mother began going to their seats. “You have a week to provide our daughter or you will face our wrath,” Nna said as I approached them.

Families are durable, but inescapable and if they go wrong they can be unbearable traps.

“If something goes wrong it may well be that witchcraft is blamed, which means someone gets blamed,” says Ezeiyoke. The story nails that sense of spreading accusation; that sense that everyone is tainted, part of the problem.

In the end all the hero can do is flee the family, lose his name, lose his identity. Disappear like his mother? Move to Europe? In a sense the story can be read as a myth of the diaspora and loss of identity.

The story is effectively written in a style flavoured with Nigerian English. At one point the father says to the hero, “Since you were a child, I have watched you whenever I was in the car with you. You often look through the window and whenever you do, it means that you have an enormous thing under your skin.”

The location of the story emerges simply and clearly. You know at once the narrator is African from the vocabulary and tone. The names, then, might tell you that the family then that the family is Igbo. References to Arsenal Football club might mean they live either in Nigeria or are diasporan in the UK, but this last question is finally dispelled.

I ask him if the characters are speaking Igbo in translation?

“In the story they are speaking Igbo in the nearest English translation. But to be honest, I don’t think about it. From primary school age, English and Igbo coexist. They don’t conflict; each has an assigned place; Igbo in the house but in school you switch automatically in English. So I write automatically in English.”

His story “The Last Man Standing” was longlisted for the Golden Baobab Award in 2010 but did not make the final cut for that anthology. It was published in Future Lovecraft edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles. It’s an end-of-the-world story about a mutated, highly contagious version of AIDS. Science fiction crosses with horror—people say a surviving 13-year-old girl is a witch. Someone retells a story of how a local native doctor conquered an evil woman who turned herself into a giant mosquito at night. Once again, accusations of witchcraft do as much harm as any disease.

He doesn’t confine himself to SFF. He is currently at work on a mainstream novel about oil and the Niger delta. His published mainstream stories include “Spinoza’s Monad” in the anthology Africa Roar, 2014 edited by Ivor Hartmann and “Asylum X” published in the Corner Club Press Quarterly Publication. Ezeiyoke’s poetry was published in the 2010 ANA Review, an annual journal of the Association of Nigerian Authors. The poem “Woman” was shortlisted for the Ghana Poetry Prize in 2013, and “Oil of Blood” was shortlisted for the Quickfox Poetry Competition.

He was born 29 years ago in Enugu, Nigeria and came to UK to study 2013. His first degree was in Philosophy. He got an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Swansea and is now studying for a graduate diploma in law from BPP in Manchester.

“My favourite writers? I have a lot. Stephen King, Chimimanda Ngozie Adichie. I like the big bestselling authors. Dan Brown, the legal writer John Grisham, author of The Firm. Most often in Nigeria it is this big bestselling authors that are readily available and cheap to buy from roadside booksellers. And it is impossible not to read them since the money that will buy for me a single African writer, say from Farafina, would buy me at least three titles from these authors. And just like any reader, the more the books, the merrier life becomes.

“One of my earliest favourite authors was Cyprian Ekwensi. He was a realist author but was overshadowed by Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. His novels are Burning Grass and Jagua Nana.”

An appreciation of Cyprian Ekwensi appeared in the journal African Writing.

“As a boy I loved Chukwuemeka Ike. I really loved his novella The Bottled Leopard. It was a about a boy who can turn into a leopard at night. I can’t forget it. It sticks to my memory even now after 20 years ago.”

An article about Ike and The Bottled Leopard was published in The Nation.

“Amos Tutuola… because of the grammar he was a bit unlucky and was pushed into a ghetto of literature. People stand away from him. He has a good imagination and writes the kind of story I want to write.

“Wole Soyinka—I revere him but what he writes is so abstract sometimes I can’t understand him, so I use him to measure how much I‘ve learned how to read and when I do, I say, oh, how intelligent I have become.” At this, Ezeiyoke roars with laughter.

Getting hold of books is still something of a problem in Enugu. “In Nigeria, Amazon is still accessible, but the exchange rate makes it a big amount. But with Farafina (publishers in Nigeria) it becomes cheaper. Most of my books come from Farafina.

“I came to the UK solely because of my writing. And I would say that my MA in Swansea University was magical. Before I came to the UK for my MA, I had only one professional publication, storywise, but now merely two years after my MA, I have at least published five short stories and a publisher has requested for the collection of my fantasy short stories.”

Since the interview in May, the collection of stories has appeared, Haunted Grave and Other Stories from Parallel Universe Publications. It includes “Eaters of Flesh,” “Last Man Standing” and two other stories previously published in anthologies.

How does he view African SFF?

“In African life, where I come from, there is not a strict line that divides fantasy from realistic, these two words are meshed.

“What African writers might bring to SFF? For me, I don’t want any African writer to feel to be under any pressure that he needed to bring anything new to SFF apart from the story that matters to him, which he alone can tell.

“It is precisely this feeling of wanting to bring something unique and special that trapped African literature, stopping it from growing for a long time. African writers, in order to fulfil this need, ended up in writing stories that must have a social function to perform, say to fight colonialism, imperialism, and corruption or to educate. Most African literature ended up in becoming an anthropological-valued literature. For me, each individual should create without thinking of any constraint placed on him to invent in a particular theme or expectation from any community. It is after the birth of each story can we then be justif[ied] to begin to construct a canon to explain what is new the story has offered.”

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

It is dusk. Miisi is sitting on a three-legged stool near the angel’s trumpet shrub with his back against the hedge. He double-storey house is a ruin. The roof and parts of the walls on the top floor are in disrepair. A man stands above him. Miisi feels imposed upon because he cannot see past the man. The man is covered in bees. He has a single hair on his head as thick as a big rope. “Get up and come with me,” the man says. Miisi knows he should ask: who are you? Come with you where? But instead he whines, “You know my hip is bad” as if he and the man have known each other for a long time.” …. Miisi and the man are standing on a hillside. They are surrounded by trees. The place is familiar even though Miisi is sure he has never been there. The bee man touches a tree and looks it up and down. “This tree will be at the centre,” he says as he walks around it still looking it up and down. “It will make the central pole.” Miisi is puzzled but the man adds, “Find a tall man, ask him to take ten strides,’ the bee man takes a stride. “in every direction around this tree and build a dwelling.” Now they are standing at on the other end of the hill Miisi and the bee man have been taken together on the hillside for years now. ‘This is Nnakato,” the bee man points to the ground. “You must retrieve her and lay her properly.” He looks at Miisi. Even his eyes are bees….

—From Kintu, (Book V, Misirayima (Miisi) Kintu)

Kintu is a huge book. Huge as in big—big time span, many characters. Its first hundred pages recreate the politics, family structures, conversations, and beliefs of the Buganda kingdom in the 1750s. It is one of the surprisingly rare attempts in fiction to imagine an African culture undamaged by invasion. It tells the story of how a curse is directed at all the descendants of Kintu Kidda.

Kintu then leapfrogs over the colonial era, to show how the curse has affected four modern Ugandan families. It saves up Idi Amin until you have read many other things you don’t know about Uganda, but then really gives you the devastation of his downfall and the war in two major stories. It saves up any discussion of neo-colonialism until it is sure you’ve absorbed a lot of less familiar information. It bounces back and forth in time from the 1970s to the 2000s, showing you the same cities and towns in different eras. Four branches of the Kintu clan are each given a book each around a major character. Scores of secondary characters also have key roles in the plot, detailed in roughly 450 pages of succinct, powerful writing.

The hinge between the historical novel and the contemporary one is a grandmother relating the legend of the Kintu Kidda curse—and that version differs from the historical reality. We hear different versions of the story and are shown the flexibility and practicality of oral literature. In one tradition, Kintu has disappeared completely and only his wife Nnakato is revered. Tradition survives alongside modernity, but continually overwritten (or rather over-spoken?), useful, alive.

Kintu is huge in impact. Richard Oduor Oduku who we met in Part One, Nairobi said this about Kintu, unprompted during his own interview:

“That book is so big here. It presents a world that has its own integrity and social relations. There is no recourse to external explanation for the curse or for undoing it.

“Sometimes we—you­­—get surprised by how much you don’t know about who you are. For me Jennifer’s book is a link to an on-going world that has not been intruded upon and does not have to pay homage to a disruptive force. Something we have longed for a long time.”

There is not a white character in the book. The colonial era is not described (one of the oldest characters, an obsessive Christian, remembers colonialism with fondness; another character’s grandparents are mentioned as living through it). For the most part, except towards the end, Western education and the diaspora are irrelevant.

Its author is well aware that the book, in its own world, has gone mega.

“Jacob Ross one of its first readers said that Kintu is the kind of novel that would become a national book. There was a genuine excitement about it in Uganda that I’d never seen before, a buzz about it. People had been saying that Uganda was a literary desert. There were so many misrepresentations that Ugandans didn’t read. Instead it kept selling out editions in East Africa. I got a letter from the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Buganda (a cultural entity inside the political one of Uganda.) It tells a Ugandan story in an Ugandan way.”

Until very recently the usual way for an African author to succeed was to win an award, or to publish in the West and be validated there. The success of Kintu came with African publication. Just before this interview, Kintu finally found a publisher in the USA (Transit Books). No UK publisher has as yet been found—for a book that is already regarded as a masterpiece. Most UK publishers said something like “It’s too African.”

Too African? The highest possible praise.

Kintu was submitted for the Kwani? Manuscript Prize and won first place, meaning that Kwani published it in Kenya for distribution in East Africa by the Kwani Trust. Since then it’s been accepted for publication in West Africa by Farafina Press. Within Africa, on African terms, it became a bestseller.

The same year as first publication (2014), Jennifer won first the African region, then the overall Commonwealth Fiction Prize for “Let’s Tell This Story Properly.” Kintu went on to be long listed for the Etisalat Prize in Nigeria. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi became a name to be reckoned with.

Book One: Kintu Kidda establishes the importance of twins in the Ganda culture. Kintu marries two twins, one for love, one for reproduction—his beloved wife, Nnakato, seems infertile. The second wife’s children are treated as if they belonged to the first.

Book Two: Suubi Nnakintu is set in 2004 tells the story of Suubi and Ssanyu, two twins. They therefore have the same actual names —Babirye and Nnakato—as Kintu Kidda’s wives. But the name Nnakato would give that away, so Suubi gives herself the name Nnakintu. It’s a lie. Any Ugandan would know someone called Nnakato is a twin. That’s something that Suubi wants to overwrite. This is only one of many subtleties of plot and culture that this Western reader did not get.

Her twin Ssanyu Babirye died as a child and haunts Suubi, enraged at being denied.

The first (attack) happened eight years ago on the morning after Suubi’s graduation. She had lain half-awake in bed when a sensation of being “locked” —she could not open her eyes or move or scream—came over her. Yet she could see a young woman standing above her bed looking down on her. The woman looked exactly like Suubi only she was so emaciated that it was surprising she could stand at all. Her skin was dry, taut and scratched. Her hair was in thick tufts. She even wore Suubi’s floral blue dress with an elasticated waist-band, yet Suubi had discarded that dress ten years earlier. ‘Who are you?’ Suubi had tried to ask. ‘Who am I, who am I ?’ The woman was very angry. ‘I am Ssanyu, Ssanyu Babirye, you chameleon! Stop telling lies.’

Says Jennifer: “The story of Suubi and Ssanyu is of the duality in the novel. The duality that is Uganda. We are both Europeanized and Ugandan. We speak both traditional language(s) and English. Someone goes to church, but then will go to the traditional healer. Someone is a scientist but will have an intense spiritual life. We have this saying in Uganda: God help me, but I’m going to run as well. We think two ways at once.”

This duality of holding traditional and modern together is fundamental to Makumbi’s own life story. In the critical element of her PhD, which also consisted of a draft of Kintu, Makumbi talked about her own biography.

One of my earliest memories is of story time in the evening in a village with my grandfather. Another is in the city foraging through my father’s bookshelves of adult books looking for something readable. The most vivid memory however is of my grandfather, who was traditional, and my father, who was thoroughly colonised, arguing about where I should live. My father insisted that I should be brought up in the city where I would get a ‘proper’ education while my grandfather argued that I should remain in the village to get grounding in tradition first, that schools there were just fine. A compromise was reached when I was four years old: I would study in the city with my father and spend term breaks with my grandfather. From then, the conflict between my father and grandfather took on the multiple facets of urban vs. rural, modern vs. traditional, Western vs. African, written vs. oral. Little did I know that this nomadic existence would be replicated at an international level: shuttling between Uganda and Britain as an adult.

In the village, the Luganda language was protected from outside influences. In the city, Jennifer was forbidden to speak Luganda, which was called “vernacular.” BBC English was the standard, and her father force-fed her Western literature. Her first experience of storytelling was in the village, retelling Goldilocks or Cinderella as new tales in Luganda. This novel Kintu could be seen as reversing that process—retelling traditional material for modern audiences.

The same PhD thesis describes Kintu as being a hybrid of forms—the Ganda myth Kintu ne Nnambi hybridized with the Christian myth of Ham.

Kintu is divided into Books to mirror the form of the Bible, especially the four gospels, and the story is crossed with the Biblical story of the curse of Ham—the most poisonous of all Biblical stories for Africans. Ham was reinvented as the cursed progenitor of all black people, assigned by God to slavery. The story of Ham is laced through the book. However this intrusion only appears in parts set in modern Uganda. Kintu of the 1700s has his origins in the first man on earth according to the Ganda, Kintu. It is important to note that you also see Christianity evolve from the stiff English version followed by the characters Kanani and Faisi to an Africanised version in 2004, where forms of traditional African worship are firmly entrenched in the Christian worship.

Really? Biblical? I didn’t get that at first reading at all. My first impression was of being lowered into the Ganda culture as it exists independent of Western intrusion.

OK, like Ham, there is a curse—a Tutsi man’s son is adopted by Kintu who slaps the boy once in reprimand—and the young man dies. His biological father Ntwire lays the curse—and all the subsequent history of the clan can be read as a struggle between Kintu’s protective spirit and Ntwire, who is determined to blight their lives.

How does that echo the story of Ham? Ham was cursed by his own father, Noah, for mocking his drunken nakedness. No adoption, no accidental homicide, no curse of one family by another. The sanest interpretation of the Biblical story is that Ham was made a servant of his brothers for his lifetime only. But colonialisation drove itself and its religion crazy. Apologists for slavery made the curse inherited, so that Ham’s children were slaves, and as a mark of the curse, their skins were darkened.

Makumbi’s thesis says: Kintu Kidda is a trident character, a kind of an unholy trinity figure. A fusion of three characters, he is a nameless and timeless ancestor of the author whispered about in family circles who brought the curse of mental health problems in the family. He is Biblical Ham, son of Noah,[1] from whom Africans supposedly descend. But most of all, he is Kintu the first man on earth in the Ganda creationist myth, Kintu ne Nambi.

The first surprise is how close personal and close the story is to the author herself—essentially the family is Makumbi’s own. She herself is a daughter of Kintu.

The second unexpected element is how this actual family story is ANOTHER kind of hybrid—of tradition and science, or at least a psychiatry-based diagnosis.

But how does it resemble the Biblical myth of Ham? Again, from the thesis:

Biblical Ham brings to Kintu’s character in the novel the idea of the potency of a person’s curse to another and the disproportionate severity of the retribution in relation to the offence committed. Biblical Ham also cements the notion of perpetuity through inheritance.

In other words, Noah’s curse was unfair. Though Ntwire’s only son was taken from him, the ruin of so many lives over hundreds of years is disproportionate.

Is there a recognition of God’s unfairness, implicit in each Book’s tale of suffering? One of the key characters is called Yobu/Job. There is something of Job in each of the Books of Kintu, including an undertow, like the Biblical book, regarding the inexplicable unfairness of God.

Each of the books focus on one terrible life after another—Suubi, starved by an aunt, and nearly kidnapped to be sold as a human sacrifice only to be haunted by the ghost of her dead twin. Kanani, made one-dimensional by a dour colonial form of Christianity and the betrayal of his children, who bear a child between them. Isaac Newton, unable to walk or speak until six because of child abuse, living through the post-Idi Amin war, and who is convinced his beloved only child is infected with HIV. Miisi, who not only loses his sanity but 11 of his 12 children to war, violence, and AIDS.

Humanity is made to suffer. Kintu is also the name of the first human in Ganda mythology. “Kintu” is a variant of the term “obuntu” or “Ubuntu” which means humanity and leads to the term Bantu which means humans in Luganda.

So the third prong of Kintu Kiddu’s origins, being the first human in traditional Ganda belief, universalizes these Books of suffering to include us all, European and African, American and Asian. In this sense, we are all of us children of Kintu, cursed to suffer disproportionately for history laid down centuries ago. I find this reading touching; since, I suppose, it includes me.

It’s not just Job or his twin sister Ruth who have Biblical names. You might need to speak Luganda to see that many of the characters have names from the story of Ham. Most significantly, the first son of Kintu named in the opening, and who is unfairly lynched for theft is called Kamu—Ham. Other characters are named for the sons of Ham—Puti (Phut, Ham’s son), Misirayimu, the long form of Miisi is a form of Mezraim, Ham’s son and Kanani is the Luganda form of Canaan, also Ham’s son. The name of the major character, Isaac Newton, manages to reference not only the Bible, but also the intrusion of European history and science.

This use of hybridized Christian/traditional names is not unique in works of what can be called African traditional belief realism. In her PhD dissertation, Makumbi points out that in The Famished Road, the figure of the abiku child, a birth from the spirit world is called Azaro, a form of Lazarus. Her thesis also examines Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s transposition of the Jesus story to Africa, The River Between.

Though I noticed some sacrificial lambs in the ending, Makumbi’s dissertation points out other resemblances to Christianity at the end—there is a father, a mother goddess, and a son.

However, Kintu has as its epigraph an 1863 quote from John Hannington Speke, the first European explorer to encounter the Ganda. In the quote, Speke sees Africa with its sons of Ham condemned to slavery as “a striking existing proof of the Holy Scriptures.” And of course that meant their position as servants was ordained by God.

The real curse of Ham is colonization. The stories of Kintu also embody the deformities of culture and character inflicted by the curse of colonialization.

“In school as a child I was taught that we Africans are Hamites. I hope this version of ‘History’ is no longer taught in Uganda. This idea that I am a descendant of Ham was deeply engrained in me until somewhere in secondary school we were taught that we are Bantu—which means human, really.”

The last two Books of Kintu confront Europe through the character of Miisi. Miisi is a more familiar figure from African fiction than most of the characters. Miisi is the Western educated man who returns. Miisi, in fact, was educated in both the Soviet Union and Oxford, so he combines many strands of Western thinking—imperialism but also a strand of European resistance to it.

As a controversial writer, Miisi pens an African fantasy that retells Frankenstein in Africa (much as the child Jennifer Nansubuga retold the story of Cinderella). It reads like a new myth called Africanstein. Makumbi, alert to issues of language, tells us Miisi writes it first in English and then translates it into Luganda.

EKISODE Buganda unlike the rest of Africa was sweet-talked onto the operating table with praises and promises. Protectorate was plastic surgery to set the sluggish African body on a faster route to maturity. But once under the chloroform, the surgeon was at liberty and did as he pleased. First he severed the hands then cut off the legs and he put the black limbs into a bin bag and disposed of them. Then he got European limbs and set upon grafting them on the black torso. When the African woke up, the European had moved into his house.

Africastein is unlike any other passage in the Books of Kintu. Stories get re-told but only orally. This one is a highly symbolic, single-author fixed piece of written mythology. It stands out, though quite short. It strikes the most piercing note of anti-colonialism in the novel.

Before this interview at a reading event with writer Abubakar Ibrahim, I’d talked to Jennifer, convinced that we are to read the curse and the magic in the novel as real. For example, Ssanyu, the vision of the dead twin who haunts Suubi possesses her and predicts that the angry Aunt Kalata will die before her… and it comes true.

It would be difficult to read the events at the end of the novel (which I won’t spoil) and not begin to feel that traditional beliefs are being validated; that both the curse that the magic that undoes it are real.

I was surprised that Jennifer was quite clear that we are free to read the novel either way: that the curse is an inherited strain of schizophrenia and/or a powerful curse laid in 1750.

“That duality is very African. You will see a lot of literature like that, mental health is read in that way, representing the rational, Western way of thinking but held in a balance with African cultures. Both do work at the same time.”

Miisi, the rationalist author of Africanstein, becomes a very reluctant spiritual leader. Yet it is to him that the visions of Kintu Kidda come—as a man made of bees. The bees arrive when his son Kamu is murdered. Miisi doesn’t know this and doesn’t learn that his last surviving son is dead for some time. The bees arrive as if they are Kamu’s spirit. Then the great spirit, Kintu Kidda himself, arrives in a vision.

Protesting all the while that these visions are the product of his own trauma and mental health issues, Miisi nevertheless is the central figure of the family reunion to banish the curse. He is the prophet who tells them how to lift the curse, while all the while telling them that it cannot be true.

Miisi is the most sceptical character in the book and the one who perhaps suffers the most, and the character who paradoxically may also have the greatest spiritual power. The Christian Kanani sees Miisi as the embodiment of Lucifer. The elders see him almost as a kind of Messiah.

Jennifer, in the interview: “In the novel this is the thing that destroys Miisi who runs mad. The family sees him as failing to have a balance between these two worldviews and that failure destroys him. If you take one view that the family curse is inherited schizophrenia, then he goes schizophrenic, and of course he had depression before and his son’s death tips the balance.”

It is not a spoiler to reveal that his son Kamu is killed—that murder happens in the first chapter. But Kamu’s corpse and its fate (the body lies unclaimed) introduce each of the Books of Kintu. I didn’t get at first reading what role Kamu’s death was playing.

Jennifer in the interview: “Kamu’s death is the trigger. It is the thing that makes the spirit of Kintu decide that he has to intervene and finally end the curse from Ntwire. It is the thing that brings the family reunion together.”

But, my Western mind whispers, only in the plot where magic is real. Miisi doesn’t know Kamu is dead, nobody does, until after the reunion and ritual. In the secular plot, it has no role to play, and that feels untidy to me.

For me, an SFF reader and writer, I just can’t stop the magic being real and thus reading Kintu as a fantasy. And I think Jennifer would say that is a choice she wants me to have.

This is a clan saga, not a family saga.

In a Western family saga, a reader scans for cousins meeting cousins. A Westerner could waste a lot of energy waiting for characters from one Book of Kintu to meet their relations in another. The characters do not come together until Book VI, a gathering of the huge clan to enact rituals to end the curse. The masterful ending then shows all the characters we have met intertwine their fates and finding their outcomes—but the threads do not gather until then. Ugandans would know that there was very little chance of such a huge clan meeting accidentally.

Throughout the novel there are subtleties that simply passed me by. One of the novel’s wonderful stories is that of Isaac Newton Kintu. He is born of a rape carried out by a Kintu schoolteacher of a girl from another clan. Isaac Newton is left in the care of a grandmother and an abusing aunt called Tendo. As a result he doesn’t speak or walk until he is six years old.

Isaac Newton has the happiest of all the personal outcomes in the novel, growing up sane and healthy, so competent that he is given the task of building the encampment, the central structure for the ending of the curse. He is the character who benefits most from the coming together of the clan, but not for reasons I could not be expected to understand.

In Ganda terms, Isaac can only be part of his father’s family, never his mother’s—being raised by his mother’s family means he has no family at all. His joy at the family reunion is best understood in those terms:

Isaac’s body still shook from the intense emotion of the rituals. He sat on the ground to try and gather himself together. He looked around the campsite and thought, “This is real”. To be within touching distance of almost three centuries’ history, to be surrounded by hundreds of relatives whose presence testified to that history. Finally, his own presence on earth was accounted for and his painful life justified. When Isaac looked back at his life – at his friend who stayed with him when he was young, at Ziraba his grandmother and at Sasa—it was not misfortune he saw, it was intervention. Most of all the twins, Babirye and Nnakato had paid him a visit, though they did not stay. There was no doubt that Kintu had tirelessly intervened in his life. Isaac could not contain his trembling.

Significantly, Isaac’s own Book is titled “Isaac Newton Kintu” —the last family name being something he claims in the course of the novel.

In Book III we are presented with a family of Christian fundamentalists, Kanani and his wife Faisi. They belong to dour Church of England cult called the Awakened. Their book traces the development of more African-friendly evangelical forms of worship—something that alarms them. Kanani and his wife are parents of twins, one male one female. In Ganda culture, twins are believed to have the same soul. The parents dress the boy Job as a girl and the identities of the twins merge for a time.

Somewhere in their intimacy, the twins conceive and give birth to a child. As a young boy, his Grandfather tells Paulo that he is the son of Tutsi who made his mother Ruth pregnant. This will have great magical and plot significance later, especially as he takes the name Kalema, the name of the boy Kintu Kidda kills. Paulo Kalema sees his biological parents Job and Ruth outside the church.

…someone recognized him and called, “Ruth, your brother’s here.” Both Ruth and Job turned. Job said, “Paulo’s not our brother, he’s our son; how many times shall we tell you?”

I knew no other way of reading this than that Job and Ruth are open about being Paulo’s biological parents. They aren’t.

Jennifer: “The tradition is that if you are a twin, you are one person so Job would be considered to be a parent alongside Ruth. The twins could speak this way and it would be very difficult for people to see the real story. The way children belong in Uganda is different. My brother’s children are my children.My son is my brother’s son. He asks me, how is our child?”

When young Ruth falls pregnant in 1972, she is sent to a secular aunt Magda who lives in the rural township of Nakaseke. One of the notable features of the novel is its use of geography to show social change:

Nakaseke was rural and traditional in ways Ruth had never known. They alighted at Nakaseke Hospital and took a narrow path up a steep hill. The path was stoney but covered in dense vegetation. The world here was quiet save for twittering birds, the odd guinea fowl scratching frenziedly or slithering lizards . As they came down the slope, they would stumble on a house here and there. The houses, sometimes as much as a kilometre apart, built with mud and roofed with corrugated iron looked squat to Ruth….The windows were small; Ruth was worried that it was dark inside the houses. Goats were tethered under trees near the dwellings. Children, especially boys in shorts who fabric had worn away at the buttocks, played in the yards.. Once in a while they came across a man wheeling a bicycle, women speaking low tones or a child rushing along the path. Villagers smiled and stepped aside for Kanani and Ruth to pass saying “See you there,” or “Greetings”. Nakaseke looked and felt like a heathen world.

It is a heathen world. Magda is a radical traditionalist—despite her name being Magdalene. In 1972, Magda runs a successful cotton farm, living in a house that looks vast to Ruth. The house—full of relatives and activity, children running to carry bags reminds one on second of reading of Miisi’s house in Book V, also rural, also enlivened by an ideology. Kanani calls her cousin—not sister—to distance himself from her. Magda finds his Christianity ridiculous; he cannot bear to stay in her house. He is shocked when she offers the simple solution of an abortion for Ruth. More about the role of strong women later in this article…

Magda shows up again in 2004, now an old woman, now called Bweeza. She has come to invite Kanani to the family reunion and is delighted to see Paulo for the first since he was born. He has a car and drives her back. Nakaseke once seemingly so distant is now a short drive away.

The new shops had an ostentatious air about them as if saying to Nakaseke, modernity has arrived can’t you see? Here hardware merchandise including cement, nails, paint and bolts were sold beside skin lotion, toilet soap, combs and make up, bleaching creams and other skincare products. One shop sold plasticware in all sorts of bright colours but on the shelves, lanterns and wax candles sat next to exercise books, biscuits, scones, and kitenge garments. Even Michelle’s Beauty Salon – which had proper sinks, wall mirrors, padded chairs and modern driers – was empty. Paulo smiled at the war between the new and the old. He wondered how long Nakaseke’s loyalty would hold out against the lure of modernity…. Magda’s huge house was old. It might have been affluent in the 50s and 60s but with age and disrepair, it looked decrepit… an old Bedford lorry with a skinny steering wheel in a black rounded cabin sat on its hinges next to a tank.

Makumbi is excellent on the meaning of landscape, how culture shapes how it is made and perceived. She is particularly good on the hilltop, flood-plain city of Kampala and its suburbs, whose topography mirrors social divides.

In 2010 I first heard Jennifer read aloud. It was the first chapter describing the lynching of Kamu, and I was knocked out. An Ugandan student in the audience said to me. “It’s very hard to hear if your family lives on the hill.” That student was correctly decoding Kamu’s social status, and knew that he would be living in the valleys.

Most of the Books focus on a different suburb or part of Kampala. So each focuses on a different ethnic mix or class as well.

“I cover parts of Buganda, mostly set in Buganda and the suburbs of Kampala. For example, Mwengo, which was the capital of Buganda Kingdom. Kampala can no longer be claimed by the Ganda. It is now everybody’s city.

So it’s a national story but the family is Ganda. The Ganda played a huge role in the history of Uganda. They invited the Christians and then flirted with colonial Britain hoping to use it to overrun other regions. But when they did, the British took it away from them saying it was still the Buganda Kingdom. The British could not say Buganda, because of the silent B’, they heard Uganda, that is how the country became Uganda. So much of the history rotates around them because of their central position in the geography. “

Jennifer studied at the Islamic University and then started teaching in Uganda in 1993. She left Uganda in 2001.

“I was not writing then. I started with poetry, just to write a diary, really. I was not one of those people who knew I would be a writer. I really first wrote in 1998, and when I came here in 2001. I rewrote it as my first novel, which was rejected and I put it away.

“I’ve been here now almost 15 years. I came originally to study. After I finished my Masters I stayed to find a publisher and agent. I’d come here to be a writer and I wasn’t going to leave until I’d published. In order to stay I had to study to renew visa, so I did a PhD in English for three years.

“It was an academic not creative PhD, looking at how African literature is read in Africa and how it is read in the West. I had been teaching literature in Africa and noticed a huge difference in the way people read a novel like Things Fall Apart here and in Africa. The West concentrates on the colonial aspect, while we concentrate on the idea of fear in the novel—how fear raised the character Okonkwo to heights and then brought him down. Westerners read Things Fall Apart still looking for themselves.

“I disagreed with my supervisor. When I raised the idea that readers in the West read African novels differently to readers on the continent she said that it couldn’t be possible because Africa was colonized by Europe and so the ways of reading were imported. Europeans in Africa and Africans in Europe can’t read a different way.

“There was a fear that if I said Westerners read differently, it meant that they read wrong. And that meant fear that maybe they can’t teach it. What they said in the end was that because there was no published research about this, my lived experiences of teaching could not be accepted. They wanted them to have been documented with references, to quote a range of authorities who would not, could not be teaching African literature in Africa. There I was thinking that I could pioneer this idea of a difference in reception of and responses to the African novel.

“I visited African profs around Boston, mainly in Harvard. They said they understood my plight but since the nature of a PhD is a western construct and I was doing it at a Western university, there was nothing they could do. They told me to go back to the UK. ‘Do what they are asking you to do or you won’t get a degree. Then come back here with your original material and do a post doc with us.’ Basically they were telling me it is the Westerners’ university, their idea of what a PhD is like, the PhD is for them, a PhD is not an African concept. The only person who would supervise a PhD like that was Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o because he too rebelled when he was told to do what he did not want to do. Unfortunately, as I was told, because Ngũgĩ did not get a PhD he could not supervise a PhD. This happened in 2008. I was not about to write a thesis which parroted western views of African audiences and which would not relate to my lived experience. The idea that lived experience is unacceptable in academia is laughable. Mocks the idea of new knowledge. Makes everything rather derivative!”

Jennifer did not get that PhD at that university. She did later, in Creative Writing from the University of Lancaster.

My Leverhulme grant is to look at the origins of African SFF, so I ask questions about early reading and influences.

“Science fiction is not a genre I was introduced to as a child. For some reason the only comics I saw were Tintin. My literary introduction was fiction for children—Enid Blyton, The Secret Seven, Famous Five, Five Find-outers, then Nancy Drew mysteries and The Hardy Boys. It was as if there was a twenty-year cultural delay.

“I did love The Spear; he was a character in a comic in a magazine called Drum published in South Africa and then Kenya. Lance the Spear is actually included in the next novel because my main character is growing up in the 1970s.

“I had romances too, lots of Mills & Boon, Harlequin, Denise Roberts. Harold Robbins’ The Carpetbaggers, Jackie Collins. These were the books we shared with each other because the libraries were destroyed. Basically if you had one novel, let’s say a Robert Ludlum or Mario Puzo, you would trade it endlessly, until it was in tatters. My trick was to lie about how long it would take me. I would easily read 400 pages in two days but I would say, I will bring it back in a week. In the three days I would trade it for another book before taking it back. When it came to Mills & Boon I would read [a novel] in four hours. I would nick it from under the pillow, where girls left them in the dormitory, read it and put it back before the girls noticed. At boarding school girls lost their novels, and people would say, go check that girl Nansubuga. But there were other book thieves in the school.

“My dad was a banker who worked for Standard Chartered in Uganda. He started me with Ladybird (a UK children’s publisher), all the fairy tales. Then put me on a steady diet of the abridged books…Dickens and Jane Austen, Mark Twain. He was set on putting me on a literary journey. He knew what he was doing, and it wasn’t African. My Dad was terribly colonized in the old way of thinking. He couldn’t talk enough about Sons and Lovers by D H Lawrence, and he swore by Shakespeare.

“I only discovered African literature on his shelf by mistake because otherwise I would run out of reading material. I chose the thinnest books—Things Fall Apart, The River Between and also Mine Boy by Peter Abrahams about working in the South African mines. That was my first exposure to South Africa, and oh my God, it was very hard to recover from.

“At O level I was set a lot of Ugandan and African literature, plays mainly, Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel or The Burden by John Ruganda. At A levels we did The Concubine, by Elechi Amadi from Nigeria. It can be read as speculative fiction. It’s about a beautiful woman whom men can’t resist but men who marry her are killed. You don’t find out until the end that she’s like a mermaid, from the sea.”

One of the criticisms of Kintu from Africa is that women replace the men. Most of the men die. Miisi runs mad. His surviving child is Kusi, a female general of great renown. In the last Book, Kusi’s orders her troops to take on a particularly nasty task. In the final chapters, Magda using the name Bweeza becomes crucial to the clan organization. Above all else, the way that the memory of Nnakato is revered in Kintu Kiddu’s own region while he himself has been forgotten. Yet, mothers, apart from the matriarch Nakato, don’t count and don’t even appear in the family tree, but so many of the major characters are women—Suubi, Kalata, Ssenga Kizza, Ruth, Isaac’s mother and grandmother, Kanani’s wife Faisi.

Jennifer: ‘There was a lot of disquiet in East Africa that this was a feminist story with the men removed. They die away and get forgotten. I never thought it was a feminist story. In fact I’ve described it as masculinist because I’d told the story through male points of view. I keep saying, wait till I publish a feminist story then you would see how not feminist Kintu is. But it seems I am the only one convinced of that.”

Jennifer has just finished her second novel, The First Woman was Fish, now with agents.

“It’s about a child, Kirabo, raised by her grandparents—her mother has disappeared. Kirabo keeps asking about her mother but gets no satisfactory answer. Finally she visits a witch, Nsuuta, to get help finding her Mom. But Nsuuta is not a witch—she is called one by Kirabo’s grandmother for having a relationship with her grandfather. But Nsuuta loves the child and starts to tell her folktales.” Jennifer read sections of the novel at Eastercon in Manchester earlier this year which sound wonderfully fantastical.

Weeks after this interview we were sitting drinking tea at KroBar and we discussing again the role of the diasporan African. I repeated what some young Kenyans were saying—that diasporans lose touch with Africa.

‘‘I worry about that too. I visit Uganda often and I am always writing for Ugandans, addressing myself to them. That changes what I write and how I say it. Thinking about how they will read it. That’s what I think will keep my books current.

“The idea that you can’t write your home away from home goes against the whole idea of imagination and creativity. I wrote about 1700s Buganda Kingdom. I believe that distance has fine-tuned my perception of Uganda. When I look at the version of my novel I brought with me and the final copy, it is clear to me that in Uganda I was too close to the action. I took things for granted. But looking back, through distance, my idea of Uganda is so focused. Besides, there are so many different Ugandas it is incredible. I have discussed ‘home’ with other Ugandans who left at the same time as I did and they have said, ‘but I don’t know that; I have never seen that in Uganda.’ That is because we all occupy different spaces within Uganda.”

The success of Kintu without having been a success first in the West is one more sign that the publishing industry in Africa for Africans is developing. As Makumbi said, as we ended this exchange, “Africa is the future.”

Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor

DETENTION CELL

DAY 8.

In a plain dark room there’s a cage. On the outside there’s a singular chair. OLIVER, bruised and battered, is in the cage, he paces back and forth with a slight limp. He speaks with an Eastern European accent.

OLIVER

Three weeks…that felt like an eternity. Bodies dangling on the edges of the earth begging for life. Endless nights of unwanted screams penetrating your abdomen becoming a sharp unbearable pain!

Oliver stands up and looks around, speaking to the other detainees.

OLIVER (CONT’D)

Brethren, the blood that has been shed will not be in vain. We will sing a new song, dance a new dance; the smell of dead flesh will not deter us…the sight of discarded bones will not DETER us.

We MUST fight…

USMAN (O.S.)

My friend will you shut up! Making so much noise, you’re giving me a head ache.

USMAN, a Border Official walks into the room carrying a book and sits on the empty chair.

OLIVER

Keeping us here is illegal. I’ve been here for 1 week now…no lawyer..

USMAN

When you came here, did you come with a lawyer?

OLIVER

It’s my right to be given one…

USMAN

See me see life! Did you think of my rights when you came into this country illegally

Oliver doesn’t answer.

USMAN (CONT’D)

Instead I am forced to come here everyday and to hear people squealing like caged animals.

Usman opens his book.

USMAN (CONT’D)

So, what is your name?

OLIVER

I already gave my name when they put me in here.

USMAN

Yes but I’m asking you.

OLIVER

It’s Arnaud.

USMAN

Arnaud Dimitri.

OLIVER

Yes that’s me.

USMAN

Is it?

OLIVER

Of course…

USMAN

Where were you born Arnaud?

OLIVER

Czech Republic.

USMAN

Date?

OLIVER

September 24th, 2081.

USMAN

You’re pretty good.

OLIVER

What are you talking about?

USMAN

Your real name isn’t Arnaud is it?

OLIVER

It is…

Usman pulls out an ID card.

USMAN

A couple of days ago – a body washed up on shore, he’d been stabbed several times. We found this ID card on him.

OLIVER

I can explain…

USMAN

Murderers and illegal immigrants are not allowed in the AU.

—From The Immigrant

This year’s Africa Writes festival ended with a performance of The Immigrant by Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor. Set at the turn of the 22nd century, it creates a future in which European migrants are trying to get into the African Union.

Joy: “I applied for Arts Council funding to develop the idea. It came from how people perceive immigrants and asylum seekers. Originally it was 1000 years in the future but when I got the money, the Council team said make it only 100 years from now.

“It’s about climate change. The winds change course. Iceland is changing from desert to a forest. The Sahara has started greening and people use solar panels for energy. The African Union becomes like the EU, a free trade area, but they don’t want 