Most people know South Africa as a country where gold is found and where apartheid existed. Some people know that South Africa had a political and spiritual renaissance in 1994 when democracy dawned and the idea of a rainbow nation spread like wildfire. But what many do not know is that South Africa has a flourishing and distinctive literary history of producing science fiction and fantasy. In this essay, we will explore the contours and main figures of this history, in the hope of bringing the rich diversity of its offerings to a wider African audience.
First, we need to be clear about what we mean when we write about “science fiction and fantasy”. We see them as two separate genres, separated by a common language, as Bertrand Russell said of England and America. While both speak the language of non-realism, reacting strongly against the strictures of social verisimilitude, they speak it in different accents. Science fiction, as Darko Suvin famously said in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979: 4), is based on a cognitive difference from the world around us. Suvin called this difference the novum, from the Latin word for “new”, and argued that science fiction introduces a rationally possible new element into the world that we know in order to create its locus. Fantasy, on the other hand, relies on non-rational, or irrational, differences from our consensus reality. The existence of magic, wizards, dragons and talking trees, for example, is not explained: it simply is, and is taken for granted in fantasy texts despite its impossibility. The two terms are often conflated into “speculative fiction”, which is any literary text that speculates about a world that might be different from our own. However, since we are writing here to an audience of aficionados, we will stick to the original terms and keep the generic boundaries intact. It is worth noting, though, that many authors represent differences from the “real” world without employing the terms “science fiction” or “fantasy”. Two famous cases in point are Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, which are set in dystopian futures (Woman on the Edge of Time is set in an alternative utopian/dystopian world). Despite this being a well-known and widely-used strategy for science fiction authors, both Atwood and Piercy insisted on having their books marketed as “mainstream” fiction, both claiming that to assign them to a “genre” would limit their appeal for readers. Finally, many mainstream authors use “magical realism” in their writing to import a novum into the social realist world, but then incorporate it as though it were there all along. For example, Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) both draw heavily on the supernatural, as the protagonists journey into realms where the dead are still very much alive. These features belong squarely to science fiction and fantasy, but as the publishers and authors of these texts do not choose to label the books as science fiction or fantasy, they are not sold, or read, as such.
An equally important term in discussions of (South) African SFF is Afrofuturism, a term that prominent Nigerian author, Nnedi Okorafor, takes huge exception to, tweeting on 16 December 2020 that “I DO NOT WRITE AFROFUTURISM. I WRITE AFRICANFUTURISM”’ Hope Wabuke explains that the former term was coined in the 1993 essay “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose” by Mark Dery. A white US critic, Dery defined “Afrofuturism” as “African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future” (Wabuke 2020: n.p.).
SF has a long tradition of arguing for, and against, its own terms and labels, and coming up with new terms and labels for the next generation of writers to argue about. Masande Ntshanga, the author of Triangulum, has a very interesting take on the debate. In an interview with Heady Mix in May 2022, “Why Afrofuturism needs more nuance”, he explains:
… a lot of what Afrofuturism draws on aesthetically, or at least how it seems to the layman or outsiders, is a recreation of the intricacies of pre-colonial culture and pre-colonial traditions and re-imagining them … . And the problem there, I guess, is that a lot of people feel like Africa hasn’t had its moment yet in order to present its own culture and its own systems. It hasn’t been given that opportunity; since colonialism and subsequent conquests, the narrative has always been determined for the continent. So, some people are sceptical of Afrofuturism because they feel like it’s a replacement of something that already exists and it’s coming from the outside and basically contributing to more erosion. (Heady Mix 2022)
South African author, Mohale Mashigo, also engages robustly with “Afrofuturism” in the Foreword to her collection of short stories, Intruders (2018). She writes:
Afrofuturism is not for Africans living in Africa.
…
Afrofuturism is an escape for those who find themselves in the minority and divorced or violently removed from their African roots, so they imagine a ‘black future’ where they aren’t a minority and are able to marry their culture with technology.
…
It would be disingenuous of me to take Afrofuturism wholesale and pretend that it is ‘my size’. (2018: x-xiv)
Afrofuturism, then, is not a comfortable subgenre for black authors from Africa. As the continent begins to decolonize its culture, African writers need create their own stories, not modelled on conditions in the African diaspora, but on life in Africa.
But we are getting sidetracked. The roots of South African science fiction and fantasy lie, properly speaking, in its myths. This is, of course, not limited to South Africa. But the myths that surround the country’s colonization and founding are deep and rich, providing veins of material for the authors of science fiction and fantasy. The myth of Adamastor tells of a Titan who coveted a nymph, and as punishment was made into a mighty mountain and placed at the southernmost tip of Africa. Adamastor is irascible and curmudgeonly and vows to place obstacles in the path of any ship that attempts to sail around his point or come safely to land. The myth has given rise to a number of fantastic texts, most prominently The Lusiads by Luiz Vaz de Camoes, the Portuguese poet who invented Adamastor and added him to the family of Titans who were already entrenched in Greek myth. Adamastor is the prototype for South African writing about an inhospitable natural world, where human beings are something of a blight. This idea was taken up by multi-genre author Peter Wilhelm in his 1994 novel The Mask of Freedom, where HIV/AIDS, population growth and crime have turned the country into a place of unfreedom. Wilhelm’s book for children, Summer’s End (1984), imagines a country in the grip of the Third Ice Age, turning parts of it into a frozen wasteland and forcing the characters to conduct their quest across sheets of ice. Wilhelm, who passed away in 2021 aged 78, was the first South African author to adopt science fiction as a serious literary pursuit. He was widely celebrated and won numerous awards for his writing.
Despite Wilhelm, science fiction and fantasy had a halting start in South Africa and have only come into their own in the post-apartheid period since 1994. Science Fiction South Africa (SFSA) is the country’s science fiction club, which was founded in 1969 so that like-minded geeks and readers could get together and talk about the things they enjoyed. In 2009 the club officially changed its name to “Science Fiction and Fantasy South Africa” (SFFSA) and met monthly for nearly 50 years before the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020 and forced meetings to come to a complete halt. It has since resumed its monthly meeting schedule. SFFSA publishes a fanzine called Probe, which, at the time of writing, had issued nearly 200 issues and publishes approximately 10 short stories a year written by (mostly) South African authors. Stories are selected by entering the club’s annual short story competition, known as the Nova Competition, and the top 10-ranking stories are published in the zine. They cover numerous South African themes, including race, language, South African politics, and the country’s lifestyle. These are more frequent in the science fiction stories than in those that use fantasy, which tend to rely on the stock motifs of dragons, castles, knights, magical skills, and so on. Over Probe’s more than 50 years of publishing, it has featured stories by several modestly well-known authors, including Gerhard Hope and Yvonne Eve Walus. Some of them are republished in this issue of Omenana.
The club has had several stalwart supporters over the years, including Arthur Goldstuck (currently CEO of World Wide Worx, a tech company), who has written four books of South African urban legends. The series was inaugurated in the 1990s, just prior to the country’s transition to democracy, at a time when the population was sorely in need of entertainment. The first two are The Rabbit in the Thorn Tree (1990), a title that alludes to the logo of one of the country’s most powerful banks, First National Bank. Showing the silhouette of a thorn tree against a turquoise background, the logo is supposed to have incorporated all kinds of shapes, including a rabbit. The Rabbit in the Thorn Tree was not science fiction, but showcased Goldstuck’s taste for non-realist modes of representation, as did its sequel, The Leopard in the Luggage (1993). In more recent years, Goldstuck has turned his hand to ghost stories, another non-realistic genre, in his two collections, The Burglar in the Bin Bag: Urban Legends, Hoaxes and Mass Hysteria (2012) and The Ghost that Closed down the Town (2012). The Burglar in the Bin Bag is a variant of The Rabbit in the Thorn Tree and Leopard in the Luggage: a light-hearted look at South African hoaxes that have put the wind up large sectors of the population. The Ghost that Closed down the Town is subtitled The Story of the Haunting of South Africa and deals with ghost stories that have circulated in the country’s cultural unconscious for centuries. (One of the most famous of these is the tale of the Flying Dutchman, the captain of a spectral ship that did not make it around the Cape of Good Hope, and was punished to sail the seas in its ghostly form for eternity.) In these highly successful non-science fiction and non-fantasy collections, Goldstuck makes the point that the social reality, although imposing and controlling, is not the only thing worth writing about.
It is not an exaggeration to say that South African science fiction and fantasy went international when Lauren Beukes started publishing. Beukes, a native of Cape Town, completed a Master’s degree in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town. Smart, sassy and fast-paced, her first novel, Moxyland (2008), described a near future in South Africa’s Mother City where four young people head towards a personal and social inevitable apocalypse as they risk their lives on different kinds of technological gamble. Relentlessly multicultural, Moxyland also examines the gritty realities of South African life — poverty-stricken townships; illegal immigrants marrying South African citizens cynically for a chance to stay in the country; the superficiality and sexuality of the Cape Town art scene — in ways that remain in the reader’s mind long after the novel has reached its climactic end. Beukes’s streetwise, snappy dialogue and hard-bitten humanism won her second novel, Zoo City (2010), the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke prize for science fiction: the first time the prize had been awarded to an African author. Zoo City blends science fiction with fantasy in its novum. In a recognizably realistic Hillbrow, a young woman called Zinzi lives with a sloth. She is one of the Aposymbiots (called “zoos”), those found guilty of a crime and sentenced to life with an animal magically bound to them. Zinzi, along with many other zoos, will find that life with an animal attached to you is neither uncomplicated misery nor uncomplicated blessing as she navigates Johannesburg’s dark criminal underworld.
After Zoo City, Beukes took up part-time residence in the USA as a writer for DC Comics, a position that sharpened her already impressive command of style and pace. Her next two novels, The Shining Girls (2013) and Broken Monsters (2014), blend science fiction and fantasy with crime narratives set in the USA. The Shining Girls tells the story of a time-travelling femicidal criminal and his eventual apprehension, while Broken Monsters recounts crimes that bizarrely result in the victims’ having some of their bodies replaced with animal body parts. Beukes’s latest novel, Afterland (2020), describes a gender-specific pandemic and is, in true Beukes style, a rollicking road trip through Midwestern America, via a den of hippies, a posse of women assassins, and an evangelical cult. With her remarkable grasp of narrative structure and her razor-sharp irony, masterfully poised on the edge of caricature, as well as her lyrical evocations of place, she is a phenomenon in her own right in South African science fiction and fantasy.
Nevertheless, Beukes was not alone in her literary success. Fellow MA in Creative Writing graduate, Sarah Lotz, occasionally works with Beukes on writing projects, and is the author of eighteen novels to date. Lotz is remarkable for her practice of writing with others, including her daughter Savannah, with whom, as Lily Herne, she has published a string of socially relevant zombie novels; the Johannesburg-based novelist Louis Greenberg, with whom, as S.L. Grey, she has published a series of macabre urban fantasies; and with Cape Town authors, Helen Moffett and Paige Nick, making up the pseudonym Helen S. Paige. Lotz has a well-known fondness for the macabre, and her work often borders on horror, as does many science fiction authors’, including Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur Goldstuck and Lauren Beukes. Not all of Lotz’s prodigious output can be classified as science fiction or fantasy, but most of it is securely located in the speculative.
Another South African author who dabbles in science fiction and fantasy, but does not embrace it as her primary metier, is Henrietta Rose-Innes. Rose-Innes is an acclaimed, but slightly under-the-radar, Cape Town-based author with six published books to her credit. In 2008 she won the Caine Prize for African Fiction for her science fiction short story, “Poison”, and in 2011 her novel, Nineveh, won the Sunday Times Prize for fiction: it is not coincidental that her two literary prizes have been garnered for speculative fiction. Prophetically, both “Poison” and Nineveh foreground environmental problems, which have come to the fore in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century and have spawned a whole new sub-genre of “climate fiction” or “cli-fi”. The plot of “Poison” is catalysed by a dangerous chemical explosion, and Nineveh describes what happens when an infestation of beetles mysteriously takes over an upmarket new housing estate. Nineveh is partly tongue in cheek, but also partly serious about the hubris of human attempts to dominate nonhuman creatures.
Zambian-born South African science fiction author, currently residing in the United Kingdom, Nick Wood’s Water Must Fall (2020) picks up the theme of environmental degradation. The novel’s novum is a near-future Africa where almost all sources of water have dried up (a situation that is currently unfolding in real time in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province). The title riffs on the well-known student protests of 2015 and 2016, with the hashtags #RhodesMustFall (demanding the removal of university statues to arch-colonizer Cecil John Rhodes) and #FeesMustFall. Alistair Mackay’s début novel, It Doesn’t Have to Be this Way (2022), is a cautionary tale imploring consumers to take better care of the nonhuman natural world, so that the nightmarish future it depicts will not come to pass. Mackay’s novel is remarkable in South African (speculative) fiction for its unapologetic focus on three gay male characters. The text does not centre the characters’ sexual orientation or sex lives, as much gay fiction in previous decades has done, and thereby normalizes their sexuality, making a welcome shift in the representation of sexual and gender diversity.
Charlie Human, a graduate of the University of Cape Town’s creative writing programme, is author of Apocalypse Now Now (2013) and its sequel Kill Baxter (2014). The setting of the former is Cape Town’s supernatural underworld, with Baxter Zevcenko and bounty hunter Jackson “Jackie” Ronin embarking on an epic quest to rescue Esme, the girl of Baxter’s dreams, after she is kidnapped by what are loosely termed “dark forces”.
Despite being a typical fantasy quest narrative, Human adds a uniquely South African flavour, by including Sieners and San mythology. Cassandra Khaw notes in a 2014 review in Strange Horizons that Kill Baxter turns the urban fantasy setting of the original into a more direct approximation of the Potterverse:
While Apocalypse Now Now only alluded to similarities to Harry Potter, Kill Baxter feels like a more active attempt at paralleling the universe that J. K. Rowling constructed. Shortly after visiting a market filled with Hidden Ones, the blanket term for the book’s ecosystem of magical races, Baxter is enlisted to attend Hexpoort, Kill Baxter‘s answer to Hogwarts. There is even a mandatory train scene, where Baxter is slowly acquainted with the supporting cast, many of whom come across as nightmare versions of Harry Potter characters.
Despite acknowledging the superficial similarity between the Potterverse and Kill Baxter, most critics also note that Human puts a decidedly zany, dark spin on Rowling’s magical education trope (which, itself, owes an enormous debt to Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle).
Andrew Miller appeared out of nowhere in the midst of dedicated South African science fiction authors with his 2015 novel Dub Steps, which won the Dinaane Literary Award for best début novel. Miller is a speaker, ghostwriter and poet, who has never ventured into science fiction since publishing Dub Steps. The novel follows the (mis)fortunes of a group of people who have mysteriously survived the disappearance of most of the humans in South Africa. After driving across the country, the group of survivors settles in an abandoned mansion in Johannesburg, where the narrator, Roy, establishes an archive documenting their existence. As they learn to get along, and not get along, to create children and educate them, to raise food and eat it, all kinds of disasters and strange serendipitous discoveries take place and they muse, obsessively and Socratically, on what makes a good human life. It is a remarkable reflection on what has been called “the human condition” under extreme pressure from the environment.
Andrew Skinner might have been considered an unusual person to publish a science fiction novel. While working on his PhD in Archaeology, Skinner wrote (and twice re-wrote) his début novel, Steel Frame (2019). It is a space opera set in an unknown region of the galaxy where a gender-indeterminate narrator called Rook is given a “shell”, the remains of a giant robot, to patrol a permanent cosmic storm called “the Eye”. The book was a success on Amazon.com, and Skinner is currently planning another novel in the same universe. Rook is a variation on Han Solo in Star Wars: a hard-bitten, cynical pilot who has fallen on hard times, but receives another chance. Steel Frame is one of the least South African-flavoured novels published by a South African author: there are no local jokes, no indigenous dialect, and certainly no landscape to link it to Skinner’s homeland.
At the other end of the spectrum in relation to situatedness, Mia Arderne’s 2020 novel, Mermaid Fillet, is saturated with South African flavour. There is multilingual slang, even multilingual puns, and numerous references to Cape Town’s Northern suburbs with all the kinds of people that one meets in such environments, including the tree-hugging vegan, the hippie, and the banggat (scaredy cat). With babies being born wearing Nike Air Jordans and a sky goddess who menstruates whenever a woman is violated in South Africa, Mermaid Fillet is more fantasy than science fiction, with a generous dose of noir crime woven in for good measure.
South Africans frequently feel as though the(ir) world is coming to an end. Popular media are full of dire prognostications such as “If so-and-so becomes President, that will be the end of the country,” “If the country’s economy is downgraded by Standard & Poors, that will be the end of the country,” and so on. This may account for the high number of apocalyptic fictions published by South African authors; but also offers an opportunity for authors to explore the limits of human endurance and resourcefulness under extreme circumstances. For example, Fred Strydom’s The Raft (2015) is premised on everyone on Earth suddenly losing their memory. Protagonist Kayle Jenner can vaguely remember something, which, he gradually realizes, is the fact that he had a son. He builds a raft with which to search for the son he can barely recall and, on the journey, confronts his hidden inner self. Similarly, Lauren Beukes’s Afterland (2020) eerily anticipates the COVID-19 pandemic that brought the world to a near halt. Fellow graduate of UCT’s Master’s degree in Creative Writing, Ilze Hugo’s The Down Days, also published in 2020, features an apocalyptic post-truth society where a mysterious epidemic dooms people to laugh themselves to death (literally). The novel was praised by critics as far afield as Tor.com and Powell’s Books.
All the books we have discussed thus far are worthy South African works of science fiction and fantasy. However, they are all written by white authors and most of them feature pre-eminently white characters. The exceptions are Beukes’s Zoo City, whose protagonist is a black woman called Zinzi December, who interacts with a multicultural and multiracial range of people; It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way, where the main characters not only include people of colour but gay people as well, and Water Must Fall, which, like Wood’s other science fiction novel, Azanian Bridges (2016), features a multiracial cast). One of the most exciting developments in the last decade years has been the gradual appearance of authors and characters of colour in the genre.
Imraan Coovadia has been director of the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Creative Writing since 2011. His novels include The Poisoners: On South Africa’s Toxic Past (2021), Tales of the Metric System (2014), The Institute for Taxi Poetry (2012), which won the M-Net Prize, and High Low In-between (2009), winner of the Sunday Times Fiction Prize and University of Johannesburg English Literary Award. Coovadia holds a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a Doctorate from Yale and has written for leading publications such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Independent, The Mail and Guardian, Times of India and The Sunday Independent.
Tales of the Metric System (2014) is interesting due its basic narrative structure of ten days spread across four decades in South African history. Where this novel succeeds so brilliantly though – and it is an overall success that overshadows its main difficulty with narrative time – is its approach to South African history. Instead of dealing with the main touchpoints that we know so well, from the Soweto riots of 1976 to the World Cup of 2010, from the unveiled horrors of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the equally horrific consequences of Thabo Mbeki’s denial of HIV/Aids, Coovadia’s stories take place in the dark cracks of history. It offers stories of ordinary people who are quite unaware they are living in a historical moment; a moment that will become embalmed in history, leaving us bereft of the specificity of that moment as lived in time. It is Coovadia’s ambitious aim here to recreate some of that specificity, which is apparent from the Paul Kruger quote at the beginning: “I set forth how I viewed the history of my people in the light of God’s Word. I began by addressing my hearers: ‘People of the Lord, you old people of the country, you newcomers, yes, even you thieves and murderers!’”
Time is also an integral theme in A Spy in Time (2018), a dystopia where Johannesburg’s extensive network of mine tunnels allows it to survive the fallout from a supernova. The main character is Enver, a time-travelling agent for the Historical Agency who hops backwards and forwards in time to preserve the integrity of the agency. In a 2018 interview with The Johannesburg Review of Books, Coovadia told Jennifer Malec about his love for SF and reading Isaac Asimov, Greg Egan, Stanislaw Lem, Octavia Butler, Robert Heinlein, and Ian Watson, among others. As a teenager, Coovadia expressed an interest to be a physicist, a notion that surfaces in ‘A Spy in Time’ with concepts such as probability theory (Malec 2018).
Shanice Ndlovu was born in Zimbabwe but has settled in South Africa. Her début, The Pride of Noonlay and Other Stories (2020), marked her foray into the realm of high fantasy writing, replete with feudal economies, warring monarchies, swords and sorcery. It is a rollicking good read, and the stories that comprise it are told with economy and style.
Probably the best science fiction novel of recent years, though, is Triangulum (2019). Author Masande Ntshanga completed a BA in Film and Media and an Honours degree in English Studies at UCT before enrolling in the MA in Creative Writing programme under the Mellon Mays Foundation. He completed the degree under the supervision of Imraan Coovadia. In 2020, Ntshanga joined the Rhodes University MA in Creative Writing Programme as a part-time lecturer, and took over the literary journal New Contrast, becoming the first black editor since it was established in 1960. Also in 2020, Triangulum was shortlisted by the African Speculative Fiction Society (ASFS). Ian Mond’s review for the Locus Magazine website notes that Triangulum is “a coming-of-age story that neatly transitions into an adult novel about the deep rifts in South African society” (Mond 2019).
The book’s fractal take on time and narrative – shifting from the long-forgotten history of the failed Ciskei experiment to Special Exclusion Zones a couple of decades in our future – speaks clearly to our Covid-19 world in a way that the author could hardly have anticipated. In author interviews Ntshanga is very careful to refer to injecting SF tropes into what he clearly considers to be a literary novel. In an interview with the Mail & Guardian, he states: “We have a tendency to take things for granted because we live here and because there are so many stories that get told about [South Africa]. So now there’s this idea we can’t write books or fiction on apartheid anymore. I’m not sure about that” (Hlalethwa 2019). In his acknowledgements, Ntshanga expresses his gratitude to writers whose output he considers invaluable: Victor LaValle, Stanislaw Lem, Colson Whitehead, Samuel R. Delaney [sic.] Significantly, most of these writers work acrossgenre. Therefore, the issue of Triangulum’s provenance as a specifically South African science fiction novel becomes far more complex from an African perspective. Nevertheless, the novel is deeply rooted in the country’s toxic and traumatic past, where “homelands” were created by government fiat for different race groups to live in, and looks forward, in the same way as It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way, to an environmental apocalypse. Ntshanga’s work adds to the trends of regionalised science fiction and fantasy adding to the internationalisation of the genre. From India to China and Cuba, local voices are becoming more and more important. We hope the trend continues and we see more proudly South African science fiction and fantasy.
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