African speculative fiction as Indigenous remembering: Contrasting stories by Jonathan Dotse and Masima Musodza

Abstract

How to understand what uniquely African contribution speculative fiction created by African authors makes is a vexed question. Drawing on concepts of the geopolitics of knowledge and locus of enunciation, from the South American tradition of decolonial theory, I argue that the term “Indigenous” must be retained to specify works that speak from epistemic locations within Indigenous African cultures. Such fiction does important remembering work by recovering, renewing, and extending Indigenous knowledge traditions and so claiming the right to imagine futures in Indigenous terms. This remembering is obscured if such fiction is examined in terms such as Afrofuturism, which primarily focuses on race, or Africanfuturism, which focuses on geographical location. Indigenous remembering works from a specific Indigenous locus of enunciation and uses this episteme to explain the present and imagine the future. Such remembering must be distinguished from works that reduce Indigenous knowledge and knowers to tokens of their culture, as the “Other” to Eurocentric knowledge and its claim of universality. I illustrate this distinction by discussing two stories, “The writing in the stars” by Jonathan Dotse and “Herbert wants to return home” by Masima Musodza, showing how Musodza’s story is told from within a specific Indigenous framework, the Shona conception of personhood known in Shona as hunhu, whereas Dotse’s tale speaks about Malian astrophysics but from outside it. It is this distinction, a vital colonial difference, that the term Indigenous African speculative fiction aims to capture.

Keywords

• African speculative fiction
• Afrofuturism
• hunhu
• relational personhood
• epistemic decolonisation