Omenana is a tri-monthly magazine that publishes speculative fiction from Africa and the African diaspora.

We focus on stories, art and essays that explore the rich cultural heritage of the continent and its people, while also embracing the fantastical and imaginative elements of science fiction, fantasy, and other genres.

Omenana magazine has featured a wide range of voices and perspectives, from established authors to new and emerging talent.

Omenana aims to promote and celebrate the diversity and richness of African speculative fiction and poetry, and to provide a platform for writers to share their stories and ideas with a global audience.

“But Africans don’t do speculative fiction!”

This is something a lot of us interested in speculative fiction have heard many times. And in a world where stereotypes have a way of taking flight and travelling, it is now almost accepted as fact.

However, this is a claim that anyone who has ever sat down to listen to tales of spirit husbands, mermaids and forest dwarfs, whose mats have the ability to make one rich, knows to be false. In our folktales, animals talked and the gods walked among men; what is called fantasy today was as real as night and day.

But we have lost the immediacy of those stories and have been reduced to trafficking in borrowed images that vilify our heritage. This is a tragedy because stories do more than entertain us. The best stories hold up a mirror to the world. They show us not just what is, but what could be, if it chose.

Omenana is the Igbo word for divinity–it also loosely translates as “culture”–and embodies our attempt to recover our wildest stories. We are looking for well-written speculative fiction that bridges the gap between past, present and future through imagination and shakes us out of the corner we have pushed ourselves into.

If you think you’ve got just the tale, send it in; we’d love to show it to the world.