A Genealogy of Science Fiction: Development Planning after Structural Adjustment

To fully understand the recent growth of science fiction’s popularity in Africa, we need to contextualize this trend within the social, political, and economic changes that have swept the continent in the last thirty-five years. Our story begins in the early 1980s, when, after two decades of growth in both readership and book production, the implementation of structural adjustments programs (or SAPs) caused African book markets to collapse. As the World Bank and IMF pressured governments to reduce their education budgets, and in the midst of widespread inflation brought on by the end of the oil boom and a negative balance of payments, book sales plummeted. By the end of the 1980s, African purchases accounted for only 20 percent of the net sales for Heinemann’s famed African Writers Series—down from 80 percent just ten years before.Footnote ⁸ These dismal figures would eventually lead to the collapse of the African Writers Series, as well as to the cancellation of popular genre fiction series, such as Macmillan’s Pacesetters imprint and Spectrum’s Sunshine Romances.Footnote ⁹ The local market for African literature would not recover until well into the 2000s, when improving economic conditions and emerging digital platforms helped to make book publishing a viable commercial venture once again.

These changes in African print culture affected not only the volume of texts in circulation, but also their formal properties. As many critics have shown, the African Writers Series, Macmillan’s Pacesetter series, and other contemporary publications were characterized by a resolute attachment to realist forms of representation. Owing in large part to the felt need to articulate a shared sense of reality—one that would be immediately accessible to all readers, who were all presumed to be part of a unified national culture—the literature of the decolonization era internalized the realist premise that the world can be described in an objective register, one in which the enumeration of value-free information, usually transmitted by a reliable third-person narrator, would form the foundation for a consensual vision of reality.Footnote ¹⁰

As SAPs went into effect in the 1980s, they eroded confidence in the realist consensus that had sustained African literature in the post-independence period. Disillusionment with failed economic policies—including the rejection of the socialist pact that had underwritten the independence movements—combined with unrest over the proliferation of military dictatorships, convinced many writers that the “reality” being promoted by nation-states was not the same “reality” being experienced by their populations. This alienation was reflected in a new brand of literature that was more self-consciously experimental than its predecessors. Novels such as Kojo Laing’s Search Sweet Country (1986), Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), and Mia Couto’s Terra Sonâmbula (Sleepwalking Land, 1992) joined earlier anti-statist fictions from the 1960s and 1970s in challenging the epistemological realism wielded by both the official institutions of the nation-state—schools, the media, and so forth—and by the realist novel. These novels insist that reality can be grounded in principles other than the epistemological realism of the nation-state, whether those principles consist of “an appeal to an ethical universal” (as Kwame Anthony Appiah has suggested), of a defense of the writer’s own subjective vision, or of a turn toward alternative sources of cultural knowledge (folklore, oral storytelling, popular performance, etc.).Footnote ¹¹

Among the many forms that this anti-realist impulse could take, perhaps the most important for the SAP period was the fantastic. As Jennifer Wenzel has shown, the fantastical narratives that became popular with Western audiences during these years—usually under the problematic label “magical realism”Footnote ¹² —were not simply a return to a more “authentic” cultural tradition, as popular accounts often suggest. Rather, the fantastical elements of these fictions were a direct response to the structural contradictions that were being enacted by economic globalization. In the case of Nigeria, for example, the surrealistic fictions produced by Ben Okri—featuring, as Wenzel points out, “Juxtapositions of bombs and bullets, coups and executions, with herbalists and witch-doctors, talking animals and masquerades,” all informed by “Yoruba narrative and cosmological traditions”—take place within a society in which the “magical” processes of oil extraction have largely undermined any discernible connection between labor and the creation of wealth.Footnote ¹³ Thus, when Okri describes magical visions of dead palm-wine tapsters who talk to snakes or medicines that spark hallucinogenic nightmares—as he does in his short-story collection Stars of the Night Curfew—he is not really taking about the “traditional,” precapitalist world that Yoruba folklore sprang from. His true referent is the modern nation of Nigeria, whose primary economic commodity, oil, is being sold on international markets in order to fund various forms of conspicuous spending—expensive infrastructure-building projects, the purchasing of Western consumer goods, and the “lavish parties and mansions that secured social status within a highly volatile prestige economy.”Footnote ¹⁴

As Wenzel explains, this economic system is “magical” in the sense that wealth seems to appear out of nowhere. The displacement of oil sales onto global markets removes important stages of the economic process from sight, making it appear as if oil is being magically converted into money and commodities without any work on the part of Nigeria’s labor force. This is why Okri’s stories return over and over to modern capitalist processes—inflation (“the miracle . . . of multiplying currency”), oil drilling (“a weird spewing of oil and animal limbs from the ground”), and modern pharmaceuticals (“the POWER-DRUG” promised to cure “all the ailments . . . and afflictions of the poor”), among others.Footnote ¹⁵ His experiments with the fantastic are primarily concerned with finding a suitable form for representing a Nigerian economic system that can no longer be contained within the totalizing vision of ethnographic realism. And what makes the fantastic particularly useful for this project is precisely its ability to shatter the placid surface of the realist text by incorporating grotesque imagery that cannot be explained by the local context—just as economic globalization has shattered any idyllic understanding of the nation as a bounded socioeconomic system.

Interestingly, though, this attraction to the fantastic never extended into science fiction. Unlike the folklore-inflected fantastic that we find in Laing, Okri, Couto, and other writers of the SAP era, science fiction was too closely associated with American neocolonialism to function as a critique of economic globalization. Even leaving aside the genre’s origins in colonial exploration tales,Footnote ¹⁶ it was hard for African writers to reconcile themselves with the amateur scientism found in science fiction. A case in point is the British-Ghanaian theorist Kodwo Eshun, who bluntly accuses science fiction of being a fictional analogue to the “futures industry”—a collection of development planners that use “mathematical formalizations such as computer simulations, economic projections, weather reports, futures trading, think-tank reports, [and] consultancy reports” to describe Africa as a “zone of absolute apocalypse.”Footnote ¹⁷ Here, Eshun draws a straight line from science fiction’s fantasies of the future to the types of expert planning that coincided with structural adjustment. For him, the reality of an externally imposed SAP system has effectively granted Western development planners a monopoly over imagining the future—one that, to use Timothy Mitchell’s influential formulation, is solidified by a pseudo-scientific language of expert “planning” that treats African nations as static “objects” waiting to be analyzed by Western technocrats.Footnote ¹⁸ And insofar as science fiction shares these same formal qualities, it, too, participates in the SAP system. The pseudo-scientific language of the narrative, the projection of the story’s events into the distant future, the fetishization of the (male) knowledge worker—all of these characteristics look far too much like the contemporary reality of structural adjustment for Eshun to be at all comfortable with them.

Nor is this connection between expert knowledge work and science fiction a new development. From early on in its history, science fiction has been intimately tied to evolving notions of scientific labor. This symbiotic relationship began in the 1940s when the editor of Astounding Science-Fiction, John W. Campbell, revolutionized the field by insisting that prospective authors familiarize themselves with modern science. Campbell’s decision helped to enact a shift away from the “scientific romances” of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and toward a more recognizably scientific product.Footnote ¹⁹ Known as “hard SF,” these tales included allusions to current scientific principles and terminology—nuclear physics, cybernetics, information theory, genetic engineering, and many others. But their real breakthrough was in the creation of a “scientific” narrative voice. In the work of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Robert A. Heinlein, and other hard SF writers, fantastical future technologies are presented in the logical language of scientific experimentation and discovery. Even when the end products are clearly fanciful, the narrative voice of these texts insists on what Kathryn Cramer calls “the scientific and technological accuracy arising from the proper attitude.”Footnote ²⁰ This was a distinct break from the earlier work of Wells, Verne, and earlier pulp stories, which had relied on mad scientists, “Lost Race” tales, and other tropes of Victorian adventure fiction. Where scientific romances were willing to let the reader suspend his or her disbelief, hard SF insisted that narratives should be written within a more realistic language of scientific speculation. We can hear this sentiment echoed years later in Nnedi Okorafor’s assertion—correct or not—that “most modern technology was born within the pages of science fiction novels”—the “computer . . . Internet, cell phones, submarines, e-readers, satellites, and robots.”Footnote ²¹ Science fiction may not be “science” per se, but according to the hard SF mindset, it is a type of theoretical knowledge work with direct affinities to the scientific imagination.

This transition from scientific romance to hard SF was facilitated by the expansion of university education in the postwar United States, which made an amateur knowledge of advanced scientific principles available to the middle-class audience who would constitute science fiction’s readers and writers.Footnote ²² Indeed, it is not coincidental that science fiction flourished in the same years that the RAND Corporation, the Hudson Institute, and other similar think tanks were developing the forecasting tools that would later shape Eshun’s “futures industry.” The growth of both science fiction and the futures industry was a byproduct of the massive federal investment in scientific research, much of which took place within laboratories and research centers in US universities. The ambitious engineering projects that emerged from these labs promised technologies whose long-term effects were far from clear—nuclear power plants, synthetic pesticides, powerful supercomputers, and many others. Officially, the task of outlining the possible effects of new technologies fell to think tanks such as the RAND Corporation, whose scenario-based simulations of nuclear warfare spawned an entire cottage industry in the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ²³ But less officially, science-fiction writers who had been exposed to recent scientific breakthroughs in their college courses took it upon themselves to formulate their own predications about the future.

It is in this sense that Alvin Toffler is able to speak about science fiction as “a kind of sociology of the future,” one whose primary virtue is not in its literary function but in its “value as a mind stretching force for the creation of the habit of anticipation.”Footnote ²⁴ Toffler’s claim is demonstrably false if we characterize science and sociology as formalized academic disciplines. But if we instead think of them as fields of knowledge—ones whose general principles were being relayed to students across the country—then science fiction emerges as a space where amateur scientism collides with advanced university research. Science-fiction writers were usually not “experts” in their chosen fields,Footnote ²⁵ but by projecting the effects of current technologies into the distant future, they were able to use literature’s potential for envisioning new worlds to insert themselves into scientific discourses from which they would otherwise be excluded.Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, in the literary world, a bit of distance from expert scientific knowledge could actually be a net positive: if modern scientific discourse was deeply invested in present-day technologies, science-fiction writers could characterize themselves as amateur knowledge workers whose job was to imagine what might come next. This is something that fiction is able to do better than science because, as Catherine Gallagher points out, fiction is fundamentally about “plausibility.” Fiction is the realm where the “nonreferential . . . could be judged generally true even though all of [its] particulars are merely imaginary”—just as science fiction can be “generally true” in its pseudo-scientific language even though its hypotheses are “merely imaginary.”Footnote ²⁷

This connection among science fiction, knowledge work, and the university points us to one of the reasons why science fiction took so long to catch on in Africa. The problem that science fiction posed to African writers was that it grounded in a specific ideological space—the land-grant research university—that was rapidly being undermined by SAPs.Footnote ²⁸ As part of their general effort to eliminate “wasteful” spending, in 1986 World Bank officials suggested to a group of African vice-chancellors that they drastically reduce the size of their institutions. According to the World Bank, it would be more cost-effective to simply close African universities and train prospective students overseas, where they would benefit from higher-quality institutions. If African universities were to remain open, continued the Bank’s representatives, then they should be restructured into technical colleges that would jettison expensive postgraduate programs and redirect funding away from arts and humanities courses.Footnote ²⁹ Doing so would not only respond to “labor market demands”—that is, reductions in the number of public service jobs, positions traditionally occupied by graduates from the humanities—but would also shrink the overall size of universities, which, the World Bank insisted, had “exceeded what can currently be justified by economic growth.”Footnote ³⁰

None of the assembled vice-chancellors took the World Bank up on its offer to end university education, but the realities of austerity economics by and large produced the same result. Between shrinking budgets and an aid system that granted Western development planners a virtual monopoly in certain fields, many aspiring professionals chose to relocate to better-funded Western universities and to more competitive job markets.Footnote ³¹ Over the next twenty-plus years, the great “brain drain” of African intellectuals would see hundreds of thousands of college graduates emigrate to the United States and western Europe.Footnote ³² By 2005, the World Bank would estimate that anywhere from “a quarter to almost a half of the college-educated nationals” of sub-Saharan countries were living abroad.Footnote ³³ Most of these émigrés had taken advantage of new immigration policies that favored educated STEM workers, and which along with SAPs had helped to consolidate the booming trade in intellectual-property industries in the global north.Footnote ³⁴ At the same time, those students and faculty who remained in Africa often found themselves at odds with the new university regime, whose policies had resulted in higher fees and a demonstrably lower-quality level of education. Anti-World Bank/IMF demonstrations became a regular feature on campuses in Nigeria, Kenya, and many other countries, often in conjunction with protests against other forms of austerity. When combined with regular faculty strikes over nonpayment of wages, these demonstrations effectively ground higher education to a halt. University closings became a regular feature of the 1980s and 1990s, with graduation numbers plummeting despite rising enrollments.Footnote ³⁵

It is little wonder, then, that a writer such as Eshun would see science fiction as a form of neocolonialism. Seen from this angle, the pressing question is not “Why did it take so long for science fiction to arrive in Africa?” but rather “What has changed in the last ten years to suddenly make science fiction an attractive genre for African writers?” What shifts in development policy, the global allocation of knowledge work, and literature’s own world-system have made it possible for a writer like Nnedi Okorafor to charge African writers with the duty to participate in “the creative process of global imagining that advances technology through stories”?Footnote ³⁶ Or to develop the small-but-growing sci-fi culture that I described in this essay’s first pages?

In part, the recent rise of science fiction speaks to key shifts in the nature of SAPs. Although scholars often talk about the structural adjustment period as if it were a single homogenous program, in reality there have been several distinct stages within the history of SAPs. After the disastrous implementation of economic reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, the World Bank and the IMF, in conjunction with the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs, began to place a heightened emphasis on what they called “poverty reduction strategies” (PRSs). Admitting that “progress has been less than hoped for” and that “lack of opportunity,” “low . . . improvements in health and education,” and “low level[s] of security” had in many cases deepened poverty, the World Bank shifted gears.Footnote ³⁷ From now on, it stipulated, countries seeking debt relief must first complete Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). These documents outlined how donor recipients would ensure that aid packages would benefit the “long-term” well-being of each nation’s poorest citizens,Footnote ³⁸ rather than simply pad the coffers of a kleptocratic elite.Footnote ³⁹ According to the World Bank, such strategies would form the foundation for the ambitious poverty-fighting objectives that would eventually be codified in the United Nation’s 2000 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and later reaffirmed in its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. By building “participatory and public institutions,”Footnote ⁴⁰ African nations would be able to “end poverty and hunger everywhere,” establish “peaceful, just and inclusive societies,” “protect human rights and promote gender equality,” “ensure the lasting protection of the planet and its natural resources,” and achieve any number of other utopian goals articulated in the United Nations’s development agendas.Footnote ⁴¹

For our purposes, what is most noteworthy about PRSPs is how they adapted notions of social and economic justice to the logic of structural adjustment by means of a rhetoric of “long-term visions.”Footnote ⁴² Unwilling to concede that social welfare programs had played any role in combating poverty, the World Bank hypothesized that post-SAP poverty-reduction schemes had failed because they had focused “largely on public expenditures and . . . spending on social programs [rather] than on infrastructure, rural development, and other areas with poverty reduction potential.”Footnote ⁴³ The problem with such programs, insisted the World Bank, was that they failed to promote the “institutional capacity development” that would make poverty-reduction programs “sustainable.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In making this distinction, the organization drew a firm distinction between the immediacy of specific social welfare programs—which were characterized as momentary alleviations of poverty that did nothing to fix the overall system—and the “long-term” benefits of “institutional” reform. Doubling down on the logic of “structural” reform that had underwritten its economic policies, the Bank lauded institutions as mechanisms that could eliminate poverty by transforming the structural conditions that produce economic inequality in the first place. According to this logic, well-designed institutions would organically lead to a more just and equitable distribution of resources, without the need for expensive welfare programs that dealt with the symptoms of poverty rather than its underlying causes. All that was needed was for the countries to properly plan and implement the necessary institutional reforms—a process that the World Bank marketed through its Vision 2020 initiative, in which low-income countries were asked to outline the comprehensive structural changes that would lead to more egalitarian societies.

The catch, though, was that the effect of these institutional reforms would be felt only in the distant future. Both the IMF and the World Bank are vague about what exactly such “institutions” look like—their descriptions of institutions tend to mix broad generalizations about democracy, broad participation, and anti-corruption with appeals to local ownership—but they do agree on one thing: “Improvements in the quality of policies and institutions require time.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In this, both organizations are following a tradition in economics and political science that defines institutions by their elongated temporal span. James March and John Olson, for example, speak of institutions as “relatively enduring collection[s] of rules and organized practices, embedded in structures of meaning and resources that are relatively invariant in the face of the turnover of individuals and relatively resilient to the idiosyncratic preferences and expectations of individuals and changing external circumstances.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In other words, what makes an institution an institution is precisely its stability over time. In contrast to individual policies and programs, which are implemented by specific individuals for specific periods of time, institutions are practices that extend beyond the present moment. What an institution does in the future is the same as what it has done in the past, and this consistency lends its actions an aura of “sustainability.” The institution is not subject to the volatilities of the present day, and for this reason it can extend its benefits far into the future—by promising, for instance, that the correct democratic institutions will ensure that the poor have access to much-needed social services in the years to come.

Unfortunately for African countries, the presumed absence of such institutions in the present suggested that nations would have to wait years for any benefits to materialize. This situation has led to a curious blend of action and passivity. On the one hand, African governments have been incorporated more directly into the planning process than in the past, as they have been given a chance to write their own “long-term visions” as a gesture toward democratic “ownership” of their own institutions.Footnote ⁴⁷ On the other hand, though, the World Bank’s institutionalist focus has seemly evacuated the agency of those same governments. After all, if what is really important is the future evolution of sustainable institutions, then all that any single person can do is help “adjust” his or her country’s institutions, and then wait. The planning document thus becomes a sort of fetishistic substitute for social action, the drafting of its speculative “vision” tantamount to the creation of that future. A prime example of this can be found in Nigeria’s ambitious 2009 plan, Nigeria Vision 20:2020, which stresses how its “authentic blueprint” will enable the “Nigerian people . . . to transform the lives of the average Nigerian.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Here, the plan itself becomes the vehicle of social action, as indicated by how quickly the text generalizes its drafters—“1,000 of the nation’s leading professionals and thinkers”—into a voice for the entirety of the “Nigerian people.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Yet because the promised changes will occur only far into the future, the only place where we can see the effects of institutional reform is in the document itself: its “vision” of a “large, strong, diversified, sustainable and competitive economy” that guarantees “a high standard of living and quality of life to its citizens” emerges as the sole imaginary space where this utopian dream is currently possible.Footnote ⁵⁰

On first glance, this system would seem to restrict social agency to the World Bank, the IMF, and its allies in national governments. But the PRSP initiative was also central in establishing a broader social imaginary linking social justice to the longue durée. In doing so, it not only valorized the labor of its own planners, but also cleared a space for other competing visions of the future.

Social Agency in the Longue Durée: Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon

In this sense, we could see the recent science-fiction boom as an attempt to grapple with social issues on the elongated timescale demanded by PRSPs. Indeed, if the fantastic provided a vehicle through which earlier writers were able to visualize the contradictions of structural adjustment, then the turn to science fiction entails an opening up of this fantastic—and the structural contradictions that go with it—onto the future. Where the fantastic of a Ben Okri highlighted the disjunction between local populations and the global forces shaping their world, science fiction provides a way of mapping similar disjunctions between the present and the future onto the longue durée of institutional change.

A perfect example of this engagement can be found in the work of the Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor. As the daughter of two Nigerian immigrants, Okorafor is very much a product of the intellectual diaspora that took place after SAPs went into effect. Trained at the University of Illinois, Michigan State University, and the University of Illinois–Chicago, Okorafor has written eloquently about the alienation she experienced on first encountering American science fiction: “what distanced me . . . was feeling that I was not part of the stories; I didn’t exist in them. I suspect the same can be said for many African writers who might consider writing science fiction.”Footnote ⁵¹ Yet unlike Chikere and Eshun, she has repeatedly insisted that science fiction can nevertheless be a valuable genre for African fiction. In a blog post that should strike us as remarkably similar in language to the planning documents we just examined, Okorafor argues that African writers must take up science fiction. Otherwise, they are at risk of remaining “absent from the creative process of global imagining that advances technology through stories.”Footnote ⁵² Here, we see Okorafor characterizing science fiction as a type of professional knowledge work, one that is intimately connected to a future-oriented planning (or what she calls an “imagining that advances”). Moreover, the brunt of her argument does not fall solely on the advancement of technology in and of itself, but on how the “imagining” of this technology can be used “to redress political and social issues.”Footnote ⁵³ Such a view echoes the prevailing sense among development planners that institutional reforms need to be more responsive to social justice issues. At the same time, it places Okorafor within a budding crop of sci-fi writers who have taken an active interest in social issues (e.g., Nola Hopkinson, N. K. Jemisin, and China Miéville).

Okorafor engages most explicitly with the logic of development planning in her 2014 novel, Lagoon. A story about an alien civilization that lands in Lagos, Okorafor’s novel is perhaps most noteworthy for how it subordinates plot, characterization, and descriptive detail to its vision of future institutional change. Compared to Okorafor’s other adult fictions,Footnote ⁵⁴ which delight in the thick descriptions of alien cultures that science fiction borrows from anthropology,Footnote ⁵⁵ Lagoon devotes little time to sketching out either the physiology or the culture of the aliens’ ambassador, Ayodele. Outside of certain broad references to ecological balance and the aliens’ collective sense of self, we learn almost nothing about their biological makeup, their social structure, or their motivations. Nor does the novel place a high emphasis on action. After an initial contact scene in which three human characters are summoned to Lagos’s Bar Beach and then abducted by the unnamed aliens, the narrative contains only the most barebones, formulaic plot. The three abductees—Adaora, a marine biologist; Agu, a soldier in the Nigerian army; and Anthony, a Ghanaian hip-hop artist—reveal to one another that they possess a number of mysterious, supernatural powers. They are then tasked by the aliens with bringing Ayodele to meet Nigeria’s president. A chaotic car ride to the airport, an even more chaotic boat trip to the aliens’ ship, and the characters’ mission is accomplished in fairly short order. Instead of the dramatic action that we are led to expect from the novel’s initial framing as a sort of adventure tale, Lagoon ends on a note of ambiguity: the aliens announce “We are change,” but the narrative does not proceed far enough into the future to let us in on what this “change” will be.Footnote ⁵⁶

Part of the reason why Okorafor minimizes the importance of dramatic action in her novel has to do with her understanding of social change. Much like the World Bank documents that I examined in the previous section of this essay, Okorafor sees social agency as something that is dispersed in both time and space. This enlarged sense of agency is reflected in the novel’s formal structure, which frequently breaks away from its three main characters so as to provide a more kaleidoscopic panorama of Lagosian life. Every chapter or two, Okorafor inserts a short vignette that refracts the aliens’ arrival through the consciousness of various peripheral characters: evangelical ministers, abusive husbands, 419 scammers, LGBT activists, and even local wildlife. These vignettes vary in length and in narrative importance: some are one-off snapshots that provide a fleeting glimpse into a particular facet of Lagosian society, while others return several times to the same characters—only to be abruptly discarded later in the narrative. For instance, one brief chapter alights on a 419 scammer, alias “Legba,” who watches as Ijele, the Igbo “Chief of All Masquerades,” crawls into a computer screen along with one of the alien visitors.Footnote ⁵⁷ Another series of vignettes focuses on an LGBT group known as the “Black Nexus,” who see the aliens’ arrival as their chance to come out of the closet. In contrast to the Legba subplot, however, this narrative arc is spread out over several chapters, and its characters seem to be more essential to the novel’s action—until Okorafor unexpectedly abandons them as well, about halfway through the narrative.

Taken in their totality, these vignettes serve as Okorafor’s method for confronting the types of social problems that PRSPs sought to alleviate. Each vignette calls the reader’s attention to a particular social issue for which there seems to be no immediate solution—at least, not in the characters’ contemporary reality. Okorafor establishes this pattern early on in her narrative, when her first shifts in perspective away from the Adaora/Agu/Anthony trio are to Adaora’s husband, Chris, and his religious adviser, Father Oke. Chris has joined Father Oke’s evangelical church after a near-death experience, and Okorafor uses Chris’s conversations with Father Oke to stress the dangers of religious fundamentalism—chief among which, in Okorafor’s eyes, is its propensity to prey off of pervasive feelings of injured masculinity. Father Oke is presented as a corrupt clergyman who cares only for wealth and power: he exploits his parishioners’ anxieties about their shrinking authority over their wives and children in order to extract both money and unthinking obedience from them. When Chris tells Father Oke about how Adaora demonstrated supernatural powers when he tried to hit her earlier that day, pinning him to the floor with an invisible force field, Father Oke assures him that Adaora was able to overpower him only because “women are . . . weak vessels” whose only strength comes from immoral “witchcraft.”Footnote ⁵⁸ And just in case the reader has not grasped the connection between religious fundamentalism and the reassertion of patriarchal authority, Father Oke blames Adaora’s “witchcraft” on her education (“What did you expect when you married a woman ocean biologist?”) and promises to help Chris get “back in control of his life and his wife” by “witch slapping” Adaora—a controversial rite practiced by certain evangelical sects in Nigeria, in which a preacher vows to cleanse “evil” from a community by enacting ritualized violence against a scapegoated woman—to wit, by slapping her.Footnote ⁵⁹

From a formalist perspective, what is interesting about this narrative structure is how it simulates the long duration of institutional change within a compressed time frame. Rather than flesh out this narrative through the techniques of social realism—in which we might expect Okorafor to sketch out the root causes of fundamentalism, detail its scope, and diagnose the possibilities for individual and collective action—Lagoon treats these vignettes as static representations of social problems. After describing the dangers of religious fundamentalism, Okorafor abruptly cuts off Father Oke’s storyline without offering a narrative resolution. The same approach is taken to LGBT rights, 419 scams, corruption in the military, and all of the other social problems that the novel introduces: after a brief snapshot that frames each issue, Okorafor shifts her attention away from these subplots, as if to suggest that none of Nigeria’s problems can be solved through immediate and direct action. By the end of the novel, almost all of the narrative’s subplots have been discarded—and, with them, all references to domestic abuse, religious fundamentalism, LGBT rights, 419 scams, and any other concrete social issue.

In their place, the narrative offers a more generalized notion of institutional reform. The closer we come to the “change” promised by the alien visitors, the more the novel shifts its focus onto Nigeria’s president. After the president is cured of a mysterious illness by the aliens,Footnote ⁶⁰ he takes to the airwaves to proclaim Nigeria’s rebirth through institutional reform. In a speech broadcast to every electronic device in the country, the president tells his constituents that the aliens’ “new technologies” and “fresh ideas” will put an end to “Nigeria’s soul-crushing corruption” and bring about “a maturing democracy.”Footnote ⁶¹ It is only after the president has trumpeted these institutional reforms that he finally turns to anything resembling social issues, and even then his language is couched in vague allusions to the “social programs” that “we will set up” in “the coming months.”Footnote ⁶² No mention is made of LGBT rights, protections for women, checks to be placed on Nigeria’s powerful evangelical churches, environmental regulations, or antipoverty programs. It is simply assumed that these details will be tackled once the proper “trained officials” are in place—once, that is, the institutions have been created.Footnote ⁶³

Okorafor’s rhetoric is clearly reminiscent of the language used by the World Bank and the IMF, which similarly locates social change in institutions rather than in any form of imminent social action. And herein lies the efficacy of the science-fiction genre to her project. Unlike realist fiction or the fantastic, which are more invested in immediacy than in the distant future—just think of the emphasis that the classical realist novel places on description or of how the fantastic relies on visual spectacles to develop its social critiqueFootnote ⁶⁴ —science fiction is a narrative form expressly designed to capture the longue durée of institutional change. As Fredric Jameson has shown, science fiction frequently uses images of alien civilizations as a means for representing just this type of gradual historical change. In Jameson’s canonical reading, the alien body’s radical foreignness serves as a cipher for precisely those future historical events that are unknowable from our present standpoint. And by bringing us, as readers, face-to-face with that foreignness, the alien body offers a condensation of long-reaching historical processes that exceed any individual human life span—the biological evolution of the species, the development of new modes of production, and changing social structures.Footnote ⁶⁵

In the case of Lagoon, these unknowable events are the growth of institutions themselves—which, in keeping with the World Bank and IMF’s definition, are treated as nothing more than coagulations of time. By juxtaposing the “change” that the aliens herald with the institutionalist rhetoric of developmentalist economics, Okorafor condenses a series of vague, unnamed structural processes into a single allegorical image. And in doing so, she is able to visualize deep historical currents that are ordinarily distinguished by their inability to be reduced to any single person, action, or time period. Okorafor drives home this very point by ending the president’s speech with a utopian vision of ecological harmony: “. . . the land would be pure and palm nuts, cocoa, and other crops would grow as they never had before. Extinct creatures would return and new ones would appear. . . . The change will be both gradual and swift.”Footnote ⁶⁶ This sudden transition away from democratic institutions and toward the natural world provides Okorafor with a clichéd symbol of deep time. Ever since James Hutton first coined the phrase “deep time,” it has been a concept that has been identified primarily with evolutionary and ecological processes, from Darwin’s theories about natural selection to present-day analyses of the “slow violence” inflicted by industrial pollution.Footnote ⁶⁷ Here, however, the image of ecological harmony is folded into a longer discourse on institutional reform and future social programs, so that the reader is left with the understanding that what we are really witnessing is an allegorical representation of institutional evolution. By speeding up ecological time, Okorafor suggests that institutional reform will be equally cleansing for Nigeria’s social and political environment. And by deflecting her primary symbol for institutional change away from human society, she is able to honor the injunction against equating institutional time with any specific actors or events—just as the World Bank has cautioned governments against relying on short-term social programs.

To be fair, Okorafor is not advocating for the same type of social passivity that the World Bank and the IMF are. If anything, Lagoon seeks to collapse the future back into the present through its formal properties. After all, one of the primary goals that science fiction tries to achieve is to make the future present. By summoning up images of a hypothetical future, sci-fi narratives project radical change into tomorrow, but they also bring that future into existence in the present moment of the reading act. Readers are provided with a glimpse into a utopian “now” that is not our world, but is given shape and substance in the pages before us. And insofar as this world is given a concrete existence in our own, present-day reality, it is ready at hand in a way that the World Bank’s long-term visions simply are not.

Lagoon negotiates this Janus-faced temporality by hinting that the “gradual and swift” transformations that the Nigerian president alludes to may have been at work for far longer than anyone initially realizes. In one of the more bizarre developments in the novel, Adaora, Anthony, and Agu suddenly reveal that they have always possessed what the reader has been led to assume were alien-granted powers. As the three characters describe their childhood discovery of their powers, Adaora reflects that “maybe it’s always been there. Beneath the surface.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The pop Freudianism contained in these lines becomes a prominent motif in the novel’s final pages, as Ayodele repeatedly reiterates that humans “need help not only on the outside but also within.”Footnote ⁶⁹ And although such refrains clearly echo a certain language of self-help that has become prevalent under neoliberalism, they also situate the beginning of institutional reform in the past, buried within the collective unconscious of the Nigerian people. In doing so, Okorafor is able to move the impending transformation to a just, equitable society nearer to the present day: because the long time span needed for institutional growth has been displaced backward into the past, the notion of a “gradual and swift” change is no longer a paradox. Rather, it is the logical articulation of a process that has been simmering “beneath the surface” for years, and now promises to erupt onto the scene, seemingly from out of nowhere—like a spaceship full of aliens.

If this is the same general logic that underwrites PRSPs, it is also a variant of that logic that refuses to wait and watch. Although Lagoon’s narrative is bound by the injunction to imagine institutional change as a deep-historical process, the novel also searches to find ways of instantiating those transformations in the present day. For now, such immediate revolutions seem to be imaginable only through certain species of narrative—in science fiction’s elongated temporal frame or in the projective rhetoric of planning. But Lagoon at least holds out hope that we might discover new methods—and new imaginaries—for envisioning social change.

Conclusion: Science Fiction as Afropolitan World-System

Does this mean that Okorafor is simply a type of amateur development planner—eager to initiate a social revolution in the present, but bound by a temporal imaginary dictated by PRSPs? Yes and no. It’s important to note that development planners do not have a monopoly over the language of structural change. Many left-wing activists would agree that reform needs to take place on an institutional level. If anything, the general drift of radical critical theory over the last fifty years has been to emphasize forms of structural violence over overt displays of discrimination. Dependency theory, critical race theory, postcolonialism, feminism, and ecocriticism—to name just a few—have all stressed the limitations that systems place on individual action, as well as the need for a more widespread transformation of discourse, ideology, and institutions. In Frantz Fanon’s famous words, it is only once such “a fundamental redistribution of relations between men” has taken place that “a new humanism . . . which embodies the actual aspirations of the people” can come into existence.Footnote ⁷⁰

But Lagoon’s fixation on the long-term growth of institutions does place its faith in the same class of intellectual workers lauded by the development-planning industry. By privileging the revolutionary power of “ideas,” “technology,” and “programs,” Okorafor’s novel tacitly agrees with one of the fundamental premises of the PRSP system—namely, that socioeconomic development will be presided over by a benevolent class of (Western-)educated planners.Footnote ⁷¹ We see this predilection in full force during the president’s speech to the Nigerian public. As he strives to sell the public on his vision of institutional reform, the president trumpets the “expert” authorities who will oversee this transition: “He mentioned Adaora, the marine biologist, who would serve as his scientific exper . . . [He] spoke of two soldiers [Agu and one of his compatriots, Hassam] . . . These were the trained officials he was appointing to take the lead in keeping everyone safe.”Footnote ⁷² Significantly, the president does not think “the world needed to know what he planned to do, he just needed to do it.”Footnote ⁷³ This is because mass political action is largely irrelevant in a world in which intellectual labor power is conceived of as the driving force of history. From the perspective of World Bank–style institutionalism, agency lies in the hands of the technocratic planners who draft “long-term visions,” whether these are the “1,000 professionals” who assembled the Nigeria Vision 20:2020 document or the “trained officials” and “experts” of Okorafor’s novel. These are the workers who are able to put their education to use by constructing elaborate visions of future societies, and these are the workers whose imaginings of the future are accorded a weight far beyond those of the rest of the population.

This confidence in technical expertise articulates one of the dominant fantasies of post-SAP fiction, and of African science fiction in particular. As intellectual labor has come to be increasingly located outside of the continent—in northern universities, medical centers, and boardrooms—many writers have struggled to imagine how this new global class might be harnessed to the project of national development. For Okorafor, as for many other African sci-fi writers, the most popular solution to this puzzle has been to fantasize about a repatriation of intellectual labor. Thus, in Lagoon Okorafor makes it a point to stress that Adaora “taught for some years at the University of California Santa Barbara” before opting “to return home.”Footnote ⁷⁴ This “return home” is remarkably similar to plotlines found in a wide range of contemporary African fiction, including Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, Deji Bryce Olukotun’s sci-fi thriller Nigerians in Space, and Okorafor’s own novella Binti. In each of these texts, protagonists leave their home countries to study abroad, only to decide that their new skills are best put to use in their native lands. The ensuing “brain gain”—to use Olukotun’s playful term for this phenomenon—incorporates the human capital embodied in this global “Afropolitan” class back into the African nation-state.Footnote ⁷⁵ And yet, in this post-SAP world, it seems as if such an intellectual elite can be produced only through a systolic-diastolic motion: first, an outward dispersion into the northern bastions of higher learning; next, a heroic return from “exile,” but one that does not fully efface the transnational identity of the Afropolitan intellectual.

The popularity of this trope leads me to two final observations about African science fiction. First, I think that it is important that we recognize the tight overlap between African science fiction’s fantasy of intellectual repatriation and sci-fi writers’ own institutional location. The human capital that sci-fi writers valorize as the essential infrastructure for institutional growth and national development is, in a very real sense, the same capital that they and their readers possess. One need only glance at the many magazines, micro-presses, and anthologies dedicated to African science fiction to see how much this is the case. Almost all such publications are digital in nature, which speaks not only to the technophilia of the science fiction genre, but also to the genre’s reliance on a transnational community of educated, professional readers—one that can be reached more easily through digital platforms than through local book markets. Even more telling, a sizable number of the writers publishing on these platforms are members of the selfsame “Afropolitan” class that Okorafor, Adichie, and Olukotun feature in their fictions. Okorafor and Olukotun, for example, both grew up in the United States and undertook graduate work in US universities (the University of Illinois–Chicago and Stanford, respectively). Similarly, many of the amateur authors featured in LAGOS_2060, AfroSF, and Omenana are educated professionals—doctors, architects, management consultants, and so on. All of these particularities point to African science fiction’s tendency to bypass national audiences in favor of a broader Afropolitan readership—one that has been routed through global institutions of higher learning and one whose members have more in common with one another than they do with their fellow nationals.

My second observation has to do with the politics of genre. If, as I have argued, African science fiction has predicated its vision of institutional growth on the “expert” knowledge of Afropolitan intellectuals, the transnational nature of this class has also enabled sci-fi narratives to sidestep the normative politics of much prize-winning African fiction—the most notable being the liberal perspective championed by the Bildungsroman genre. In his compelling account of postcolonial fiction, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, Joseph Slaughter associates the Bildungsroman form with “a larger discourse of development that is imagined to be governed by natural laws and that is historically bound to the modern institutions and technics of state legitimacy.”Footnote ⁷⁶ For Slaughter, the widespread popularity of the Bildungsroman form has narrowed the politics of African fiction into a classically liberal form: the nation-state becomes enshrined as the foundation for personal “development,” and the state’s legitimacy is in turn buttressed by a public sphere of rational discourse. Because of this ideological move, such novels tend to conceive of political action in a classically liberal set of terms—individual and group rights, inclusion within the state hierarchy, and, of course, personal freedom.

Yet it is this very national public sphere—and the political positions that go along with it—that African science fiction manages to evade. By grounding themselves in a transnational community of readers, African sci-fi novels place themselves at a certain remove from the authorizing institutions of the nation-state. No longer beholden to liberal narratives of national-personal development, these texts become permeable to the radical politics that have often found a ready home in the sci-fi genre—for example, in the libertarianism of a Robert A. Heinlein, the democratic socialism of a Kim Stanley Robinson, the anarchism of an Ursula K. LeGuin, and in the emerging LGBT and alt-right voices that have dominated the field in recent years.Footnote ⁷⁷ All of these writers have found science fiction’s vaunted subcultural community to be more welcoming to radical politics than mainstream middlebrow fiction. The small, niche audience formed by its consumers—whether these are the self-proclaimed “geeks” of US fandom or the Afropolitan readers of African science fiction—has allowed writers to cultivate readers who define themselves by their social, political, and aesthetic distance from mainstream culture. And in the vision of long-term change that is so essential to sci-fi novels, these writers can imagine a world in which their political beliefs have finally been realized—in libertarian utopias of heroic individualism, in post-capitalist societies of actually existing socialism, and even in the grandiose plans of World Bank policy papers.

We can see this transnational scope in any number of recent sci-fi novels. Take Olukotun’s Nigerians in Space, which uses the conceit of a secret space program to imagine the repatriation of intellectual labor in Nigeria. A multigenerational narrative that spans the United States, France, Switzerland, and South Africa, Nigerians in Space rigorously keeps its characters outside of the Nigerian nation—in part, because this allows Olukotun to distance them from the military dictatorship that controlled Nigeria between 1993 and 1998. (The novel’s early action focuses on the collapse of the fictionalized space program in 1993, when General Sani Abacha overthrew Ernest Shonekan’s civilian government, and then jumps ahead to the present day.) Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City takes a similar approach when it encodes recent debates about South African crime into a sci-fi register, using the “zoos” of the title—humans who have been bonded to animal familiars as a punishment for their crimes—to explore how nations deprive criminals of basic infrastructural support systems.Footnote ⁷⁸ Even Beukes’s Moxyland (2008), which is less self-consciously global than these other novels, seems to recognize the political potential of transnational subcultures. The hackers, activists, and government agents who populate Moxyland live almost entirely in immersive Internet-gaming worlds, which Beukes portrays as open to two competing long-term visions for society: the total victory of consumer culture and the radical separatism of anticorporate activists.

What this means is that the politics of African science fiction is radically uncertain. On the one hand, the genre’s transnational scope has opened it to the neoliberal rhetoric of World Bank–IMF development planning, with its privileging of global economic forces over national sovereignty. On the other hand, that very same transnationalism can also provide a setting for discussions that are regularly foreclosed from the field of national politics, such as the status of LGBT rights, the need for environmental protection, and secular critiques of religious fundamentalism. What needs to be stressed is that neither of these options is a foregone conclusion. African science fiction’s investment in the long-term growth of institutions can and does enable different types of thinking, even as these ideas remain rooted in the intellectual capital of an Afropolitan elite. What is most exciting about this genre—new as it is—is to see where these thoughts will take us.