Urban Legends as an Outlet for The Modern African Writer of The Speculative – Hannu Afere

The consensus of social commentators is that legends have a basis in fact. While this may sometimes not necessarily be true, it usually is a reasonable conclusion.

Many of the people who relate urban legends believe the stories. And why not? There’s just enough reason to believe as there is not to.

In Egypt for instance, around 1327 BC, Tutankhamen, the most illustrious child-pharaoh was declared dead. He was buried in an ornate tomb, surrounded by his treasures. Millennia after, an archaeologist named Howard Carter led the excavation of the tomb, despite warnings of Pharaoh Tut’s curse. Legend had it that anyone who disturbed the tomb would be cursed until death, and a short while after the excavation, those involved started dropping dead. First, a cobra killed Carter’s pet canary in his home, then Lord Carnarvon (who funded the excavation) died from a mosquito bite. Then others followed. Twenty-seven people died in the following years, and it was said the curse would only end once all the treasures had been returned to the tomb.

Perhaps this incident is just one giant coincidence – a lot of coincidences depending on how you look at it – but the telling and the retelling of it by locals had a lot of people believing the mummy’s curse was actually effective.

While stories like this one are sometimes only good for shock value or amusement, the speculative fiction genre has increasingly become the prime location for inspiring representations of our culture’s deepest concerns and hopes.

It is the responsibility of the modern African writer to harness the seemingly unconscious aspects of human psychology in making sense of the world, responding to it by creating imaginative, inventive, and artistic expressions.

Urban legends are a socially accepted way to express fear. It also serves to warn others about real or perceived dangers.

In 1956, the construction of the Kariba Dam had just begun. The Zambezi River god, Nyaminyami, who has features akin to that of a dragon and is in charge of all living creatures in and around the Zambezi River, took vengeance on those involved with the construction of the Dam. The project resulted in the traditional Batonga people leaving the area, but they believed in Nyaminyami and trusted that the home of their fathers would be saved. Shortly after work began, a flood destroyed the dam and killed many workers, taking their bodies with it. Relatives were told to make a sacrifice or the bodies would never be recovered. A calf was slaughtered and offered to Nyaminyami, and true to legend, the bodies of the workers appeared where the animal was placed.

The science of it at first glance, is unexplainable. But when one realizes there are no mysteries, just an unavailability of knowledge, frustration reduces. One learns to keep an open mind.

Fear can be a powerful currency to have. In the late nineties and early noughties in Nigeria, as a child, if one saw money on the ground in the streets, one was told he would turn to a yam tuber if he picked it. Mostly, this was a tale used to curb greed and petty theft, but it was effective in a way many other moral instructions and cautionary tales weren’t, because of the fear factor.

Children were told that if they bent over and looked between their legs in a crowded market place, they would see ghosts. And if the ghost knocked their heads, they would run mad. “Ghosts” were a euphemism for “kidnappers” or “kids getting lost”. No child wanted to run mad, so they stayed close to their parents or guardians, and of course refrained from being too playful.

If they took food from strangers or indiscriminately ate biscuits or toffees from their peers, they could be initiated to a witchcraft coven. If they pasted faux tattoos from chewing gum, the tattoos would come to life and strangle them.

In 2002, in a very popular area of Lagos, Nigeria, a little boy disappeared. He had been trapped in a bush crying all night, and from the sounds, it was quite clear he was in severe pains. The legend of the Bush Baby cautions one to refrain from rushing out to help when one hears the pitiful cries of a toddler for they can be demonic.

Because of this urban legend, no one went to the little boy’s rescue. In the morning, when his family discovered that their son was missing, they raised an alarm. But they were too late. He was never seen again. If there are very few things as painful as the loss of a child, there is nothing more terrible than the fact that there was no closure. In stories like these, one is acutely aware of the many ways in which truth can be said to be stranger than fiction.

Because urban legends are about life and society today, many concern new technologies and societal fears that didn’t exist when most traditional legends arose. Travel by air, terrorism threats, data farming on social media networks, money making rituals, and government conspiracy theories are some of the themes that often reoccur.

As with traditional legends, urban legends are passed verbally, but they also spread via the Internet, e-mail, and social media. Via Whatsapp broadcast alone, for example, one is able to reach tens of thousands of people very quickly; thus, urban legends are distributed much faster than traditional legends ever were.

Writing about these legends paves the way for open debating on social problems. “The best tellers—and the most popular legends—have the potential to transform social structures for better or worse,” says Dr. Bill Ellis, associate professor of English and American studies at Penn State Hazleton.

Fiction, by definition, is untrue, so usually it includes some level of speculation. The variance is in what’s being speculated upon. Whatever is being speculated upon must be more essential than character or plot. Speculative fiction is any fiction in which the “laws” of that world are – overtly or subtly – different from ours. The defining line is not so much scale of the untruth as the plausibility in reality.

In an era progressively besotted with and reliant on social media, the modern writer must tap into the accountability implicit to the very nature of print. Science and technology may have quite significantly deepened his responsibility but it has not changed it. Urban legend telling for the modern writer of the speculative is often a fundamentally political act. Writers must make use of concepts and techniques generated in the past generation to debate on present-day received wisdom. Instead of using the word “urban legend” as a label indicative of skepticism, they need to see it as a collective investigatory process found among all classes, tribes and religion in Africa.