By Oluwanifemi Bakare

There is a particular scene in Lionheart – Genevieve Nnaji’s 2018 film, Nigeria’s first submission to the Academy Awards for Best International Feature – that has nothing to do with its plot and everything to do with what Nigerian storytelling is quietly doing to itself. A man in a village square is telling a story. He is not telling it to move the plot forward. He is telling it because stories, in that square, in that tradition, are the thing that holds a community together before and after everything else. The film is, on its surface, a corporate drama. But underneath it runs this older current: the sense that the world being depicted has a cosmology, a memory, a set of beliefs about what the living owe the dead and what the land owes the people who name it.

That undercurrent is what African speculative fiction has been excavating, with increasing urgency and increasing craft, for the past two decades. And the argument this essay wants to make is a specific one: the African imagination was never lost. It was suppressed, deliberately and systematically, and it is now returning – not as nostalgia, not as ethnic cosplay, but as a rigorous, politically alive, formally ambitious body of work that is reshaping what science fiction, fantasy, and speculative literature can do and say.

The Suppression Was Not Metaphorical

To talk about the return of the African imagination, we have to first be honest about what its suppression looked like, and resist the temptation to make it abstract.

The colonial project was, among many other things, an epistemological project. It did not only extract resources and redraw borders; it worked to delegitimise entire systems of knowing. Oral tradition was reframed as illiteracy. Animism was reframed as superstition. The cosmologies of the Yoruba, the Igbo, the Akan, the Zulu – systems that had, for centuries, offered coherent accounts of creation, justice, time, and the relationship between the human and the divine – were reclassified as folklore at best, devil worship at worst. The reclassification was not casual. It was enforced through missionary schools, colonial administration, and a publishing infrastructure that decided what counted as literature and what counted as legend.

What this did to the imagination of a continent was not merely cultural. It was structural. If your creation myths are primitive, then your visions of the future will be, too. If your gods are superstition, then any story that takes those gods seriously is not serious literature, it is genre at best, embarrassment at worst.

Speculative fiction, in the African context, is the literature that refused that reclassification.

Nnedi Okorafor and the Naming of a Genre

In 2019, Nnedi Okorafor – the Nigerian-American writer whose work spans science fiction, fantasy, and everything that falls between and beyond those categories – published an essay distinguishing Africanfuturism from Afrofuturism. The distinction matters enormously.

Afrofuturism, as a concept, emerged primarily from the African diaspora in America. It is a vital and politically necessary tradition – one that takes the trauma of the Middle Passage as its originating rupture and imagines what Black life, culture, and futurity look like on the other side of that break. Sun Ra’s cosmic jazz, Octavia Butler’s fiction, Parliament-Funkadelic’s mythology, and Black Panther‘s screen mythology: these are Afrofuturist touchstones, and their preoccupation is with Blackness as it was forged in the crucible of American racism, slavery, and resistance.

Africanfuturism, as Okorafor defines it, is rooted specifically in Africa – in African history, African cosmologies, African futures as imagined from the continent itself rather than from the diaspora’s relationship to the West. Where Afrofuturism often negotiates with American culture even as it critiques it, Africanfuturism does not centre the West at all. The West is not the reference point. Africa is.

This is not a hierarchical distinction – it is a geographic and political one, and it opens up a different set of questions. What does a technological future look like when its foundation is Igbo ontology rather than Silicon Valley? What does space travel mean when the cosmonauts carry the memory of Sango’s lightning rather than NASA’s Cold War mythology? What does an apocalypse look like when it is understood through the Yoruba concept of ajogun – the forces of adversity, the warriors of misfortune – rather than through the Book of Revelation?

Okorafor’s own fiction — Who Fears Death, Binti, Lagoon — performs these questions rather than merely posing them. Lagoon, set in Lagos, begins with an alien arrival that the city absorbs not with panic but with the particular, exhausted pragmatism of a place that has survived colonialism, military dictatorship, and traffic on the Third Mainland Bridge. Lagos, in that novel, is not a backdrop. It is a character with its own intelligence, its own relationship to the strange, its own rules. The speculative element does not descend onto Africa from the outside. It rises from inside it.

Yoruba Time and the Problem of Linearity

One of the recurring formal problems of Western speculative fiction is its relationship to time. The genre – especially science fiction, is structured around a linear model: there is the present, there is the future extrapolated from it, and the narrative moves forward along that axis. Even dystopias are linear. Even apocalypses have a before and an after.

Yoruba cosmology does not work this way.

In Yoruba thought, time is not a straight line but a cycle, or more precisely; a spiral. The dead are not simply gone; they are present, watchful, capable of intervention. The Egungun masquerade is not a symbolic gesture toward the ancestors; it is, within the tradition’s own logic, an actual visitation. Ori – the personal spiritual essence that each individual carries, selected before birth – means that identity is not merely a social construction but a metaphysical one, chosen in a realm that precedes the physical world and persists beyond it.

What happens when speculative fiction is built on this architecture rather than a Western one?

You get narratives where the future and the past are not opposites but are in conversation, where an ancestor’s decision reverberates into a great-grandchild’s present, not as metaphor but as causal fact. You get protagonists whose interiority includes a relationship with Orun – the spiritual realm – that is neither supernatural horror nor cheap magic but simply the texture of a world that was always understood to have more dimensions than the visible ones.

You also get a very different relationship to prophecy. In the Western speculative tradition, prophecy is often a plot device – something to be fulfilled or subverted, a tension-generator. In Yoruba narrative tradition, Ifa divination is not a prophecy system but a consultation system. You do not receive a fixed future; you receive a reading of your situation, drawn from a vast oral corpus of odu – narrative precedents – that your trained interpreter matches to your circumstances. The future is not determined. It is negotiated. You have agency, at least in principle. You can make the right sacrifices, take the right actions, alter the trajectory.

That is a fundamentally different model of destiny than the one that structures most Western science fiction, and it produces fundamentally different narratives.

Nollywood as Speculative Infrastructure

Any serious account of African speculative imagination has to contend with Nollywood – not the prestige art film circuit, but the vast, prolific, formally anarchic popular cinema that has been producing speculative content since the early 1990s with almost no critical recognition.

The early Nollywood canon is saturated with what we would now call speculative elements: occult power, shapeshifting, divine intervention, the permeability of the boundary between the living and the dead. Critics – particularly Western critics, tended to read this as naivety, as a cinema that hadn’t yet learned to separate realism from superstition. That reading was wrong. It was, more precisely, a failure to recognise a different cosmological framework operating at full confidence.

When a Nollywood film of the 1990s depicts a man making a covenant with a water spirit in exchange for wealth, it is not being primitive. It is working from a worldview in which such covenants are understood to be real, consequential, and structurally embedded in how power and prosperity circulate. The drama is not whether the supernatural is real – that question is settled – but what it costs, what it demands, and whether the human being at the centre of it has the moral resources to navigate the exchange.

This is speculative fiction. It is using the non-real, or the differently real, to examine questions about power, greed, community, and consequence that are urgently, materially present. The fact that it did not emerge from a university creative writing programme or a major publishing house does not make it less sophisticated. It makes it more important, because it demonstrates that the African speculative imagination did not wait for institutional permission to exist.

What contemporary African speculative fiction is doing, in part, is bringing critical language and formal rigour to an imaginative tradition that Nollywood, in its chaotic, brilliant, underfunded way, kept alive.

The Middle Passage as Speculative Rupture

The diaspora question cannot be avoided, even in an essay that is writing from the continent.

The Middle Passage, the forced transportation of millions of Africans across the Atlantic, was not only a historical atrocity. It was a speculative event, in the most brutal possible sense: it created a population of people for whom the past had been violently severed, for whom origin was not a stable fact but a wound, and for whom the future had to be imagined anew, without the cosmological infrastructure that had scaffolded the imagination and knowledge of their ancestors.

Afrofuturism is, in part, a response to that severance, an attempt to reconstruct African futures from the material available after the break. And its most ambitious works ask a question that is deeply speculative: what if the rupture had not happened? What would African civilizations look like now, on their own developmental trajectory, without four centuries of extraction and disruption?

Black Panther – the Marvel film, yes, but also the decades of comic-book mythology it draws from – is a sustained attempt to answer that question. Wakanda is not a utopia exactly; it is a thought experiment. It is Africa-that-was-never-colonised, Africa-whose-technology-evolved-from-within, Africa-that-had-the-luxury-of-being-left-alone. That it resonated as powerfully as it did, across the continent and across the diaspora, says something about the depth of the hunger for exactly that imagining.

But the continent and the diaspora are not the same project, even when they share a longing. The African writer on the continent is not writing from rupture. She is writing from continuity – however interrupted, however damaged, however complicated by the colonial period and its aftershocks. She has access, even if partial, to living traditions, to languages that carry cosmological weight, to communities that still practice these traditions – a continuity that is real, if uneven, and not neatly confined to the continent: Ifa is kept alive in Bahia and Havana too, sometimes with a freedom that parts of Yorubaland itself no longer have.

That access is both a gift and a responsibility. It means that African speculative fiction from the continent has an obligation to those traditions – not to preserve them in amber, but to think with them, argue with them, push them into new shapes and new futures while remaining accountable to what they actually mean.

What the Return Looks Like

The return of the African imagination is not a single movement with a manifesto. It is a proliferation – of writers, of publishers, of magazines, of conversations. Omenana itself is evidence of it: a speculative fiction magazine dedicated specifically to African stories and writers of African heritage, operating from the conviction that the genre has both room and need for these voices.

What characterizes the best of this work is not the presence of African settings or African characters – though those matter, but a deeper formal shift: the willingness to let African epistemologies structure the story rather than merely decorate it. The difference between a story set in Lagos that uses Yoruba mythology as window dressing, and a story whose entire logic, its sense of cause and effect, its model of identity, its understanding of what a person owes and is owed, is built from Yoruba thought: that difference is the difference between representation and imagination. One borrows the symbols. The other borrows the logic.

The stakes are not only literary. Speculative fiction is, at its best, a rehearsal space for futures. It allows a culture to ask, in the relatively low-stakes environment of narrative: what do we want? What are we afraid of? What does justice look like? What does it cost? A continent that cannot imagine its own future, on its own terms, from its own traditions, in its own languages and forms, is a continent that has ceded that future to someone else’s imagination.

African speculative fiction is the refusal of that cession. It is the insistence that the future is not a Western invention, that technology is not inherently Eurocentric, that the question of what comes next belongs to everyone who will live in it.

The imagination was never lost. It was waiting, as Oya waits at the edge of the storm; patient, gathering force, knowing that the wind will turn.

Bio

Oluwanifemi Bakare is a Nigerian writer currently in school. His work investigates the human condition with a strange and particular eye — drawn to the absurd, the overlooked, and the things people do when they think no one is watching. He writes fiction, essays, and the occasional thing that refuses to be either. He loves films and the filmmaking process with an embarrassing sincerity. His work has appeared in Claudine, Afreada, and Akpata Magazine.