INTRODUCTION
As the origin of humanity and home to the world’s oldest civilizations, Africa is the origin story of storytelling. It is from its vast lands that humanity first sought to make sense of our world, the cosmos above and beyond us, the natural flora and fauna below. And it is from Africa, perhaps first known as Alkebulan, Af-ru-ka, Ethiopia, Ortigia, Corphye, Libya, among others, that the first humans emerged from stardust and traveled far, carrying their stories with them throughout the continent and on to other distant lands. These stories, first shared in mother tongues, took root in other nations and helped form other cultures. But many are still with us, while others too numerous to name, too old to be remembered, helped form the foundation from which an entire genre was later created: fantasy, which helped form the speculative fiction genre we think of today.
Until recently, the stories and literature of Africa and her diaspora were rarely discussed in the vaulted halls of the genre. For many years Black writers (and readers) of speculative fiction were discussed as dark matter, nonexistent, phantoms in a field that is full of ghosts. The pioneering works of writers such as Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Amos Tutuola, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ben Okri, Kojo Laing, Charles R. Saunders, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Steven Barnes, Jewelle Gomez, L. A. Banks, Eric Jerome Dickey, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Linda D. Addison, Nisi Shawl, Walter Mosley, Andrea D. Hairston, and others created a body of work that blazed a trail for new writers to come. Anthologies such as the groundbreaking volumes Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, edited by Sheree R. Thomas, as well as Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction and Mojo: Conjure Stories, edited by Nalo Hopkinson, helped challenge the assumption of invisibility and created more space for new works from a variety of communities to find their way into the publishing world.
As newer audiences embrace storytelling from around the world, there is an excitement and openness to exploring rich tales that speak to the diverse cultural heritage that is born from not only Africa’s broad and diverse diaspora, but from the continent of Africa itself, with its fifty-four nations, nine territories, and two independent states. Where before we spoke of dark matter, now Black writers from across the continent and around the world speak of black holes and wormholes, pathways and portals through time and space, wondrous mythologies and creations of new and old gods to reconnect the world to the origin, the source, the mother of all its stories. With this anthology, we hope to welcome readers to new tales and storytelling styles, inviting lovers of the speculative fiction genre to immerse themselves in a myriad of futurisms.
Fortunately today, there are more wonderful places where this work is supported. Presently, publishing African speculative fiction is less a project than a mission, a statement asserting not only the viability of the subgenre, but the necessity of pasts, presents, and futures for Black people. Independent Black-owned presses like MVmedia, Mocha Memoirs Press, and Rosarium Publishing have fostered countless careers. Short fiction magazines Genesis, Omenana: Speculative Fiction Magazine, and FIYAH: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction have cultivated a plethora of voices in the genre, allowing authors to hone their craft with authentic stories rooted in their culture, struggles, and dreams. Multiple anthologies over the decades since Dark Matter have contributed to the proliferation of Black speculative short fiction, such as, but not limited to: Dark Faith, edited by Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon; Dark Thirst by Omar Tyree, Donna Hill, and Monica Jackson; Dark Dreams and Voices from the Other Side, edited by Brandon Massey; So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Uppinder Mehan and Nalo Hopkinson; Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology, edited by Milton J. Davis and Charles R. Saunders; the AfroSF series, edited by Ivor W. Hartmann; Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond, edited by Bill Campbell and Edward Austin Hall; Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Pan Morigan, and Troy L. Wiggins; Obsidian’s Speculating Futures: Black Imagination & the Arts, guest edited by Sheree Renée Thomas with Nisi Shawl, Isiah Lavender III, and Krista Franklin; Slay: Stories of the Vampire Noire, edited by Nicole Givens Kurtz; A Phoenix First Must Burn, edited by Patrice Caldwell; Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, edited by Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown; Jalada 02: Afrofuture(s), edited by Moses Kilolo; New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, edited by Nisi Shawl; Imagine Africa 500, edited by Billy Kahora; Lagos_2060: Exciting Sci-Fi Stories from Nigeria, edited by Ayodele Arigbabu; Africanfuturism: An Anthology, edited by Wole Talabi; Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora, edited by Zelda Knight and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki; in addition to special volumes published by Black literary journals such as Callaloo, Transition, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Drumvoices Revue, The Black Scholar, Renaissance Noire, A Gathering of the Tribes, Anansi: Fiction from the African Diaspora, and the African American Review, to name a few.
And the innovative work of Black comic book artists and cosplayers around the world cannot be overlooked in this journey. The accomplishments of the Sims family in creating Brotherman, Turtel Onli and Yumy Odom’s pioneering work in creating the first Black Comic Book Festivals, the legendary Milestone Media, ANIA Comics Group, YouNeek Studios, Comic Republic, Leti Arts, Kugali and the founders of the Black Comic Book Festival in Harlem—Jerry Craft, John Jennings, Deirdre Hollman, and Jonathan Gayles—the Megascope imprint, and Tim Fielder’s Infinitum are all important figures and milestones among many in the comics community.
This anthology is inspired by this exciting growth and celebrates African and Afrodiasporic writers and the many stories they have to share with the world. It combines intergenerational voices, new and emerging as well as established authors, from across the globe, continental and diasporan. Africa Risen seeks to continue the mission of imagining, combining genres and infusing them with tradition, futurism, and a healthy serving of hope. Within these pages, you will be transported to the Black Fantastic and African Weird, tinged with Horror Noire, on a fantastical Pan-African journey featuring synthetic witches, goddesses, starwatchers, and much more.
We hope that Africa Risen inspires even more creative work, community-building, and scholarship in the field, as history has inspired us. As you read and explore these original stories, remember that this is a movement rather than a moment, a promising creative burgeoning. Because Africa isn’t rising—it’s already here.
—Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight
THE BLUE HOUSE
by Dilman Dila
A house loomed on the horizon, bright blue walls stuck out of gray rocks, barely discernible against the bare sky. Cana-B70 activated the telephoto in her eyes, and the lens whirred. Discs turned in her head with a scratching sound, prompting maintenance.sys to send yet another note to Katwe Garage. Her Outbox bulged, bloated with rejection. The lens failed to protrude. She launched the PhotoEdit App and zoomed in on the picture of the landscape, cropping out the house and ending up with a heavily pixelated image. The scratching grew louder as mem.sys scanned billions of media files in her drive to understand the house. It appeared circular, with a cone-shaped roof, much like the peasant huts in some of the photos she had, dated five hundred years ago. The late-afternoon sun bounced off its roof, and she thought she could smell the paint. In contrast, recent pictures of buildings had roofs that were too rusted to reflect any light, if any roof remained at all, and walls bled bare of paint. She searched the pixels around the house for evidence of a civilization that maintained the property. Nothing. Just bare gray rocks crowding an impossibly new house.
Perhaps it is a mirage.
Her system hung up. The discs stopped scratching, the gears in her belly ceased whirring, and the fans on her back froze. She had had a thought.… Mem.sys had not made calculations on image comparisons to associate the house with an illusion. It had received data from somewhere; something had whispered. She checked the address of the sender and found a strange program in a chip inside her head, Organic.sys, whose metadata identified it as a secondary operating system. It had become corrupted and, exactly fifty years, eight months, twenty-four days, six hours, forty minutes, and five seconds ago, had stopped functioning. Organic.sys sent another data packet to auto-correct “stopped functioning.” Died. A memory purge had cleaned her system of the dead program, and yet, here it was, sending her data like a ghost whispering to a child.
Refresh.sys auto-started, the gears resumed their gentle hum, and Organic.sys auto-launched out of its grave. Security.sys tried to shut it down, but mem.sys overrode security, for it wanted to understand what was happening. The gears in her belly clanked and rattled as Organic.sys struggled to hold on to the thought, to nudge it back to levels that it told mem.sys were human. Am I still alive? Her power usage shot up and heat rose in her belly, making her insides hotter than the rock on which she stood. The fans on her back doubled their rounds per minute, and the liquid in her chest encasing CPU-3, the only processor still functioning, froze to keep it cool. Too late. Mem.sys closed Organic.sys, but CPU-3 overclocked, and shut down, plunging her into blackness.
* * *
Mercury dropped into the thermometer’s bulb, triggering a lever to flip her battery switch, and she whirred back to life. Mem.sys revived her senses and she could see the sun going down, ice sheets forming on the rocks and beads of it sitting on her arm like little balls. The horizon was already too dark for her to see the strange building. She checked event.log to understand what caused the crash: A blue house, inexplicably new. An illusion? Organic memory detected. Power surge. CPU overload. Organic.sys had generated a record.log file, where it noted its thoughts. The last line just before she plunged into blackness said, “If it’s a mirage, shimmering in the heat wave, then I’m still alive.”
She did not understand that line, or anything else in Organic.sys’s log file. She was alive. She could see the sun go out, hear ice wrapping itself around rocks, smell the chill, taste the fear of dying alone, and feel the desperation to fix her withering body. Life. Was Organic.sys referring to its own death fifty years ago? Had the blue house triggered its resurrect? Why? To get answers she had to go into quasi-hibernation mode and launch Organic.sys without straining her processor, and the best time to do it was when in her tent. Not now.
The moon did not come and the night-vision mode gave everything a greenish hue, lending the rocks the look of sculptures in the photo captioned “New Art Museum.” She analyzed images of houses at night and understood that, if it were inhabited, it would have lights, glowing in the dark, but the horizon was a sheet of blackness.
Copyright © 2022 by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight
