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Africanfuturista! The fantastical adventures of Nnedi Okorafor
Starting out with a small handful of sci-fi and fantasy short stories and novellas, Nnedi Okorafor’s legend – and bibliography – has grown. With a good number of successful books, the Nigerian-American writer’s work continues to attract readers to Africanfuturism, a fast-growing genre. And with a well-received foray into comic books for Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, and even IDW, she has cemented her place in the collective hearts of geekdom.
By Abdulkareem Baba Aminu
Spaceships, terrorist aliens, water spirits, soldiers, Boko Haram, and wet piles of meat. These aren’t part of a kind of dark poetry, but mainstays of some of the best work of writer Nnedi Okorafor. Her work in her genre of choice Africanfuturism (one word, no space), her speculative fiction and fantasy work, are among the most unique today. Africanfuturism, which Okorafor coined, is an exciting subgenre that welds science fiction and technology to African mythologies, weaving black people —or blackness, really— into fertile worlds rife with story possibilities.
Back to Okorafor, she was 19 when she began to write stories, from a hospital bed, paralyzed from spinal surgery complications. She never stopped, getting published for the first time in 1999, a short story called ‘Uche’ for an international women’s online journal whose name she forgets. But she remembers that “It was cool.” Now 48, she says: “I don’t write to get published, I write because I like writing, so it felt right.”
“I don’t write to get published, I write because I like writing, so it felt right.”
When asked what early influences might have nudged her towards sci-fi and fantasy, Okorafor recalled moments in Nigeria where she noticed the coexistence of traditional ways and technology. “I realized that I wasn’t seeing this side of Africa as a whole in the stories I was reading, or the books I was seeing published,” she says.
Okorafor has a number of times cited Nigeria as her muse, and she says that’s because she is Nigerian, and identifies with that. “That’s how it works,” she adds, “My parents have been taking my siblings and me there since we were very young.” On those trips, they would first stay in Lagos, which is very urban, then for the second part of the trip, off they’d go to her parents’ villages in the South-East.
Okorafor describes those trips as ‘epic’. “For all of us, in wonderful and terrible and magical ways. They got under my skin. When I wrote my very first piece of fiction, it was no surprise that it was set in Nigeria. Whenever I visit, I naturally inhale stories.”
“When I wrote my very first piece of fiction, it was no surprise that it was set in Nigeria. Whenever I visit, I naturally inhale stories.”
Okorafor tweeted in August 2017, that publisher Marvel’s anthology comic book, ‘VenomVerse: War Stories’, would feature an 8-page story she’s written. The internet, as it tends to often do, broke in two, but with excitement. Drawn by Tana Ford (with whom Okorafor would later collaborate on the Eisner-winning ‘LaGuardia’ at Dark Horse), the story featured Black Panther, The Rhino, and Venom, and it also introduced a Nigerian character – one of few at the big publisher – called Ngozi. In the short tale, she served a deft, future shock-style twist ending which left readers wanting more.
Marvel heeded, handing their main black character to her to write, in a digital-only series titled ‘Black Panther: Long Live The King’ that was a hit with readers and critics alike. Drawn by André Lima Araújo, whose gorgeous line work helped weave Okorafor’s world-building words out in a sprawling, visual feast that’s fit for royalty, it was followed by ‘Wakanda Forever’, a miniseries that saw her play in a full Marvel sandbox, writing stories involving the publisher’s most iconic characters like Spider-Man, the X-Men, and many others.
Marvel heeded, handing their main black character to her to write, in a digital-only series titled ‘Black Panther: Long Live The King’ that was a hit with readers and critics alike.
But hold up: the Wakandan king’s book isn’t Okorafor’s first comic book rodeo. “That was in 2012, for DC/Vertigo, for an anthology called ‘Mystery in Space’. My story was called ‘The Elgort’, illustrated by Michael Kaluta,” she says. The ‘VenomVerse: War Stories’ tale happened when Marvel asked her to write Black Panther. “After two weeks of thought, I said ‘Yes!’ We’d discussed me writing some other character before this, but Black Panther was the one I felt I could do the most justice to,” she tells me. For research, Okorafor jumped into the stories written by writers Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Roxanne Gay, as well as some of the very first Black Panther comics (about which she said ‘Heh, those were interesting.’)
Okorafor also ended up having to research quantum physics and biotech, and she took a closer look at the fictional metal vibranium, as well as the properties of meteors. “It was a lot,” she said. The research paid off, making ‘Long Live the King’ read very believably, even at its most fantastical.
The writer has been reading comics since she was a child. “I read them mainly in the newspaper, and was so obsessed with them that I would collect pages and pages,” she says. “As a kid, it was more the medium of it, the shape of lines, the containment of text, the narrative relationship between text and image. I’d stare and stare at the pages and I couldn’t quite understand why. I stared at Garfield for so long once, maybe for over two hours, that to this day I can still draw his face perfectly.”
The writer has been reading comics since she was a child. “I read them mainly in the newspaper, and was so obsessed with them that I would collect pages and pages.”
It is quite possible that her fondness for Garfield sparked a love the writer has for felines. She currently has two striking cats called Periwinkle Chukwu (soon to be the star of his own graphic novel called ‘Space Cat’, written by Okorafor and drawn by Ford) and Neptune Onyedike, both of them with quite the social media presence. So it’s no surprise that one of her three favourite comic books include the pet-centric ‘We3’ (“Grant Morrison is my favorite comics writer,” she says), which she also confesses is the first comic to make her cry. Okorafor’s other faves include ‘Wonder Woman’ (“Gail Simone’s run portrayed the unapologetic Wonder Woman I’ve always wanted to see”), and ‘Y: The Last Man’ (“Brian K. Vaughn’s work there is excellent storytelling”).
With a well-received, if inevitable, return to writing comic books, and with Black Panther under her belt, Okorafor was asked which other Marvel or DC characters she would like to tackle. “Vixen. Maybe Storm,” she says.
It is quite possible that her fondness for Garfield sparked a love the writer has for felines. She currently has two striking cats called Periwinkle Chukwu (soon to be the star of his own graphic novel called ‘Space Cat’, written by Okorafor and drawn by Ford) and Neptune Onyedike, both of them with quite the social media presence.
Okorafor finds writing comic books very different from writing novels. “Comics are a visual medium, and I have to come at them in this way. The first phase of scripting for me is by hand, and sometimes I even sketch the individual panels. At the same time, when I write prose, I’m also very visual, so moving back and forth between the mediums isn’t as jarring as it might be for other novelists. And dealing with the visual medium of film has also helped me. I feel like I’m becoming fluent in multiple languages from various language families.”
Back again to her own creations, Okorafor’s ‘Binti’ won both the 2016 Nebula Award and 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novella, while ‘Who Fears Death’, which won the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, is being turned into a highly-anticipated HBO series, adapted by ‘Game Of Thrones’ writer George R.R Martin.
Okorafor finds writing comic books very different from writing novels. “Comics are a visual medium, and I have to come at them in this way.”
Okorafor has a breath-taking oeuvre of work and is making a transition to TV pretty well, with several projects being developed at the same time. There’s a good number of her books out now, including the heartfelt YA ‘Ikenga’, the striking Africanfuturist ‘Remote Control’, and the absolutely brilliant ‘Noor’, a welcome return to adult sci-fi (yay!). And any true fan knows there will be more out any minute from now. That, however, is when it comes to books. But does Okorafor like writing comic books enough to stay? “Yes,” she answered. And the resounding cheers of her legion of fans could be heard around geekdom, mine included.
A version of this article was first published in Full Bleed Vol. 2 (IDW Publishing), in 2018. It has been updated to include recent information and perspectives.
