Contemporary African Literature and Publishing: Speculative Fiction

Around the end of 2019, some African writers working in speculative fiction started to move away from the label Afrofuturism, feeling that it didn’t quite capture the cultural depth or specific realities of African life. They began advocating for terms that better reflected their roots and perspectives. Leading this shift was Nigerian American author Nnedi Okorafor, who introduced new language to describe these stories on their own terms. 

To better describe the kind of stories she and others were telling, Okorafor introduced two new sub genres: Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism. Africanfuturism is a branch of science fiction that’s rooted in African cultures, histories, and perspectives—it imagines futures shaped by African realities, not Western ones. Africanjujuism, on the other hand, leans into fantasy and draws from African spiritual beliefs, mythologies, and cosmologies. Both terms reflect a desire to tell stories that are grounded in African worldviews while still pushing the boundaries of imagination.