Alter-Africas: Science Fiction and the Post-Colonial Black African Novel Ian P. MacDonald ...

263 Pages·2014·11.39 MB·English

Alter-Africas: Science Fiction and the Post-Colonial Black African Novel
Ian P. MacDonald

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Columbia University
2014
© 2014
Ian P. MacDonald
All Rights Reserved
Abstract

Alter-Africas: Science Fiction and the Post-Colonial Black African Novel
Ian P. MacDonald

My project investigates the emergence of near-future fiction in the post-colonial African
novel. Analyzing The Rape of Shavi (1983) by Buchi Emecheta, Osiris Rising (1995) by Ayi
Kwei Armah, Wizard of the Crow (2006) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and Big Bishop Roko and
the Altar Gangsters (2006) by B. Kojo Laing, I gauge the impact of African science fiction
on issues of historicity, economics, statism and localized identities and how these have
adapted or are adapting to an increasingly globalized and technophilic world. Identifying
sf’s roots in the European travelogue, I attend to the way each author codes technology in
the text and the manners in which technophilic spaces exacerbate or ease the frequent
tension between modernity and tradition in African literature. By reading these works
against novels by, among others, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Robert Heinlein, and
Chinua Achebe, I conclude that recent developments in the African sf novel offer a
compelling critique on the genre’s colonial heritage and have progressively indigenized sf
by wedding it to local traditions of orature and myth. While Black African sf production has
been historically overlooked in literary studies, it is important to revisit early moves in the
direction of African near-future fiction in order to contextualize the rising interest in the
genre on the part of African authors.
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements (iv)
Epigraphs (v)

Introduction
“Whitey on the Moon”: Travel Literature, Ethnography, and the Roots of the African
SF Novel

I. Always Already Known: Afronauts and the Paradox of African Techno-Science (1)
II. The Initial Frontier: Travel Literature, Ethnography, and Techno-Teleology (6)
III. Bucking Genealogy: Sf, Imperialism, and Resistance (19)
IV. Black Is the Future (28)

Chapter 1
Strangers in a Strange Land: The Rape of Shavi and the Contact Zone

I. 1. Introduction (44)
I. 2. Through a Mirror Darkly: Unraveling the Unity of the Objective Observer (47)
I. 3. The Blind Leading the Blind (59)
I. 4. Tradition at a Distance: Nativism in Emecheta and Achebe (69)
I. 5. A Bow in the Cloud: The “New Ark” and Heinlein’s Libertarian Utopianism (77)
I. 6. Apocalypse and Ambiguity (87)

  i
Chapter 2
Days of Past, Future: Osiris Rising and the Risks of Historical Fracture

II. 1. Introduction (92)
II. 2. Techno Mumbo Jumbo (97)
II. 3. Postmodern Civilization and Its Discontents (111)
II. 4. Technology and Ambivalence in Osiris Rising’s Utopian Future (118)
II. 5. Osiris Reconstructed (125)

Chapter 3
Stasis, Cybogres, and Women: Globalism and Near-Future Utopics in Ngũgĩ’s Wizard
of the Crow

III. 1. Introduction: Wizard of the Crow as Utopian Intertext (133)
III. 2. Time Indefinite: Fixity and Stasis in Ngũgĩ’s Aburĩria (141)
III. 3. Frozen Time, Frozen Spaces: Rachel and the Museum of Arrested Motion (149)
III. 4. “Space Is Our Refuge”: The Dialectics of Myth and Science (158)
III. 5. Conclusion (169)

Chapter 4
The Creolization of Science Fiction: Big Bishop Roko and Jujutech

IV. 1. Introduction (172)
IV. 2. The Word as World: A Wordman’s Manifesto (179)

  ii
IV. 3. Jujutech: Technology at the Intersection of Nature and Religion (189)
IV. 4. The Internet Gene (201)
IV. 5. “Let Us All Mutate Together”: A Call for Technohumanism (206)

Conclusion
Let the Emperor Tremble: Notes on (a) Future Form

I. “Superpower Africa”: Africa and the Twenty-First Century (211)
II. Where Has All the Magic Gone? On the Dangers of Generic Cooption (218)
III. Pumzi: Eco-criticism in the Post-Traditional Age (222)

Endnotes (228)
Bibliography (238)

  iii
Acknowledgements

There are always more people who have earned the right to heartfelt thanks in these
situations than there is practical time to provide it. In the aim of brevity, I would like to
thank my sponsors, Brent Hayes Edwards and Joseph Slaughter, for maintaining faith in me
when, for a long time, I appeared out of my depth. A special thanks to Emrah Efe, James
Livingston, and Ross Hamilton for treating me as a colleague even in those rough patches
when I did not feel like one. I would also have been lost early without the mentoring
provided by Bruce Robbins. Thank you also to Tsitsi Jaji for sacrificing some of her
valuable summer to join my committee. My parents, Dr. Marguerite MacDonald and Dr.
Scott MacDonald deserve, albeit ambivalent, thanks for structuring my world such that a
doctorate seemed both important and feasible, as does Patricia O’Connor who did her best
to save me from such a fate. Much thanks to Bill and Ellen Polak for keeping us afloat for lo
these many graduate school years, and to Cynthia Richards and the faculty of the English
department at Wittenberg University for welcoming me and making me feel at home. Also
thanks to Rich Bailey and Ryan Jones who sat down on a sunny Saturday to read through a
manuscript from a field they were not familiar with about texts they had never encountered
and still managed to ask important questions. And the deepest appreciation goes to my wife
and closest friend, Kate MacDonald Polak, for her long-standing patience. Having the
opportunity to watch her complete her own doctoral work helped model successful writing
behavior, and without her thorough edits and suggestions, and her willingness to put up with
me, this project would never have been completed.
N.B.: Rest in Peace, Nadine Gordimer, who passed away the very day I distributed
this dissertation. Your work will live on in my classrooms and countless others.

  iv
Hard to salute each other, harder to describe each other, and hardest to look at each other at
our destination.
--Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
--Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters

Que faisons-nous ici-bas? Nous préparons les floraisons de demain. Nous sommes tous du
fumier d’humanité future.
--Leo Érrera, “Pensées IV”

  v
Introduction

“Whitey on the Moon”: Travel Literature, Ethnography, and the Roots of the African SF
Novel

I can't pay no doctor bill, but Whitey's on the moon
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still
While Whitey's on the moon.
The man just upped my rent last night
'Cause Whitey's on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But Whitey's on the moon.
--Gil Scott Heron, “Whitey on the Moon”

The Americans have gone to the moon. And the Russians. The Chinese and Indians
will go there soon. Africans are the only ones who are stuck here. We must also go
there and say: ‘What are you people doing up here?’
--Yoweni Museveni, Address to the Uganda Law Society in Entebbe

I. Always Already Known: Afronauts and the Paradox of African Techno-Science

The central images of Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel's recent project
“Afronauts”1 provide informative examples of the manner by which western discourse
regularly treats the intersection of science fiction and Africa. Citing as influence the short-
lived and highly unofficial Zambia National Academy of Science Space Research and
Philosophy (ZNASSRP)—formed by Edward Makuka Nkoloso in the years leading up to
Zambian independence in 1964—Middel’s photographs characterize “space age” Africans
as anything but: a clownish masquerade playing out the worn aesthetics of 1960s-era NASA
and pulp sf2 magazines. Middel juxtaposes elements of the traditional and the futuristic,
indicating the ways in which African sf wrestles with the inherent tension between the
technophobia common in pre-colonial nostalgia and the technophilia of hyper-modernity.
However, Middel’s treatment, like initial western media reactions to Nkoloso, threatens to
1
err too far toward the satirical, reinscribing perceived teleologies concerning technology and
progress that resist the idea of Africans participating in the techno-scientific avant-garde.
One of Middel’s portraits provides a close-up of her subject in an anachronistic helmet and
flight suit, raffia escaping to his shoulders. The man’s matted hair sags beneath the raised
visor, covering his eyes so completely that it is difficult to imagine him seeing effectively.
Behind him, a garbage dump, or the rubble of a collapsed building, fills the remainder of the
camera’s angle, its grimy walls effectively bisecting the astronaut where they meet in a
vertex behind his head. Another photo displays an “afronaut” carefully stepping through a
field of dried reeds and grasses wearing a kente-cloth space suit and a Ray Bradbury-esque
fishbowl helmet. Both treatments—with their “astronauts” and their sere, unforgiving
landscapes—imply voyagers investigating worlds far beyond their own. A third shot shows
the second astronaut, this time wrapped in what is figured within the photo as a tentacle,
akin to those of alien creatures on sf magazine covers. Yet, the alien settings of Middel’s
photos eventually resolve into the astronauts’ homes, and the undeveloped, overtly natural,
drought ridden and even post-apocalyptic elements of the photos’ backdrops stand in stark
contrast to the development and technology necessary for the conceit of futuristic travel that
the figures’ costumes presume. At the edge of the third photo is the elephant for which the
“tentacle” is but a trunk. The African astronaut gets immediately reintegrated into the
foreign landscape that serves as the ostensibly alien destination for his voyage.
As noted, Middel cites the influence of the ZNASSRP in the construction of these
pieces. Initial reactions to Nkoloso’s admittedly comical organization, by Time magazine
and others, treated it as an in-joke concerning Africa's techno-social status. "Nkoloso,” the
Time article quipped, “is training twelve Zambian astronauts, including a curvaceous 16-
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