Nigerian Speculative Fiction has come a long way from Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, two works of fiction that were regarded as the pinnacles of genre-defying work for decades by breaking out of the realism readers had been too familiar with, taking storytelling out of the physical plane with absurd odysseys that still stayed true to the Nigerian spirit.
2000s speculative fiction has been defined by exploring genres such as fantasy and science fiction, with writers like Nnedi Okorafor-who coined the terms Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism to separate the genres of sci-fi and fantasy, respectively, in Africa from those of the Western world, pioneering the new era of these works, with her books Zahrah The Windseeker, Lagoon, Who Fears Death, the Binti trilogy, to mention a few. Other writers such as Tade Thompson (Rosewater) and Akwaeke Emezi (The Death of Vivek Orji, Freshwater) have also championed speculative writing by further expanding on the primary genres, Thompson elevating into cyberpunk, Emezi exploring queerness through absurdism and magical realism, through themes and structure.
In the 2020s, two anthologies have dared again to further evolve Nigerian literature, Eloghosa Osunde’s Vagabonds and Wole Talabi’s Convergence Problems.
Eloghosa Osunde’s debut novel, Vagabonds, a collection of stories that are all connected, is a brilliant work of queer fiction, exploring Lagos (or Eko, as she calls it in her book)as a sentient entity, a city alive, she oscillates between surrealism and what is the gritty realism of being queer in Lagos, and by extension, Nigeria.
The book which was published in 2022, starts with a quote by the author.
“There are simple and good and straightforward and well-behaved people, I’m sure.
But this is not a book about them.”
This plays a profound role in the novel’s entirety, as its characters are never outrightly or bluntly good or bad but morally grey, non-binary. Vagabonds are defined as people who do not belong, wanderers; the book says, according to places in Nigeria, vagabonds are males dressing as females, and vice versa. Eko is introduced as a consuming force, a voyeuristic city, watching your every move, waiting to chew you and spit you out, and taking pleasure in all of; this hovers over the entirety of the book. The narrator and anchor for the book is an entity called Tatafo, who works for Eko, an observer, storyteller, and sometimes interferer.
The stories range in themes. Thomas is a story about a man named Thomas who grew up believing fables and myths, only to be thrown into a spiral of paranoia, doubt, and the pursuit of truth that ends with him being sucked into a literal-metaphysical spiral. Night Wind is a story about an oscillating devil who serves justice to a child molester. After God, Fear Women is about a village where women mysteriously disappear and leave their husbands in hysterics.
The Only Way Out Is Through is a story written as a collection of letters from a woman to her dead lover, who is another woman, a guaranteed tearjerker with the lengths it’s willing to go to communicate its intimacy. There Is Love At Home is about two lesbian sex workers who fall in love and find safety in each other and the freedom of expression that comes with their work.
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As the book progresses, the stories and their characters intertwine as an embodiment of the city, climaxing until the epic-scale story at the end that brings everything together: a fellowship of the vagabonds, a nocturnal odyssey, a hurrah for queerness in Nigeria, a song for those who don’t belong, who were told all their lives that they were the world’s oddities and condemned for it.
In my opinion, the definitive Nigerian work of queer fiction, Vagabonds is unapologetic, bizarre, and fluid; stories are told with intent, pidgin is made lingua franca, Eko is given a soul, and it is hungry, as the characters navigate between heres and theres, the book also travels between the physical world and the spiritual, stories are surreal and provoking, a novel that dares to go places an entire country called taboo.
If you’re looking for yourself, this is not a book with a concrete identity, this is not a book that tells you who you are; Vagabonds is a companion, it says it’s okay if you haven’t found yourself, it says finding yourself is a journey that should be savored because it is beautiful.
Another book that provokes genre and tradition is Wole Talabi’s 2024 African futurist anthology, Convergence Problems.
Wole-who is also an engineer – introduces the book by saying:
“When re-imagining the world, thinking about the potential of some wondrous new scientific discovery or technology, some new social structure or what the world would be like if some mythical power truly existed, it is almost impossible not to see all the problems that could arise. Things will go wrong. There will be difficulties. Adjustments will have to be made.
Challenges will come with any version of reality we imagine, no matter how optimistic. In other words, convergence problems will be experienced.
Hence the title of this collection.”
And then:
“Many of these stories in this collection introduce fun and exciting concepts but they can be dark too. They deal with some of the nastier aspects of being human and they interrogate challenges to identity, independence, sense of self. But perhaps the most important thing I have learned about convergence problems is this: no matter how troublesome they are, they can always be resolved.
One way or the other.”
The stories in the book explore science fiction in contemporary Nigeria’s society, identity intertwining with technology, what the exploration of the future means for us, losing and finding culture, navigating equations, questioning reality.
The book starts with Debut, a story about an AI system engineering what it perceives to be ar. Moving further down the book, we see Saturday’s Song, a sequel to one of his other stories, Wednesday’s Story, which is itself a tie-in to his debut novel, Shigidi And The Brass Head Of Obalufon. The story tells about the days of the week as cosmic entities telling a story to themselves that plays out like a Yoruba folktale.
Ganger is a story set in futurist Nigeria about a city where robots do all the work and the people aren’t allowed to leave; it follows Adelaide, who yearns for freedom from the strict monitoring everyone has to suffer; she longs to step outside the city and eventually comes in possession of a chip called a ganger that allows her transfer her consciousness to a robot and move around unnoticed.
Abeokuta52 and Comments On Your Provisional Patent Application For An Eternal Spirit Core are stories written in the formats of a Nairaland forum blog post and an online patent application form, respectively. A Dream Of Electric Mothers is a surreal story about artificial intelligence that allows you to communicate with a projection of your ancestors once you have fallen into an induced sleep state.
Wole takes this book as an analysis of scientific exploration from a Nigerian perspective; the stories are ‘what ifs’ as he projects himself into possible futures that are presented as mythos adjacent. Masquerades, spirits, AI, evolution conflict, love, fear, sentient cities, claustrophobia, and space exploration, experimentation is of optimal importance; form is toyed with, questions are asked, and it is up to us to answer them.
Convergence Problems is as the name implies, but it is so much more, it is divine, soul, it is calculative, machine. It is a portal to universes familiar, the journey is yours, enter.
Vagabonds and Convergence Problems are glimpses into the future of Nigerian speculative fiction and even the country’s literature as a whole, raw, inquisitive, daring and innovative, these stories immortalized their characters and their experiences, immortalized the world they existed in and still staying true to the history of the country the writers came from, surreal, absurd, epic and intimate, they are must reads for anyone who wants to explore without rules, may the coming years bring us more revolutionary works of art.
Vagabonds was published in Nigeria by Farafina Books. Convergence Problems was published by DAW Books.