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, Ngũgĩ 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.
She climbed down the rock, testing each foothold for slipperiness, and mounted her bicycle-cart, which contained everything she needed to stay alive: a charger, a battery-powered thermal tent that supplemented her body heat, and a 3D printer she kept in the hope of finding cartridges of plastic filaments, or even bacteria-based ink, and printing out new parts to repair her body. She lined the tires with spiked rubber for a better grip on the ice, and then rode into the darkness.
She rode fast, anxious to investigate the house, for it might have cartridges. Perhaps it would be warm, for the data she had said houses became warm at night. She calculated that she would reach it before midnight, when temperatures dropped to negative one hundred. Her joints creaked as she pedaled, and again maintenance.sys auto-sent a note to Katwe Garage, reminding them that she needed oiling. The Outbox bulged with her solitude. It had been a very long time since she last encountered the carcass of another android and found recyclable parts and usable oil. The cart slid on the ice with a crunching sound, and she rode hard until the ice formed around the tires, trapping her. Then she put up the tent and settled for the night.
She initiated quasi-hibernation and launched Organic.sys. Nothing happened. The ghost did not whisper. Confused, she re-examined the log file, retracing the events that had triggered Organic.sys to resurrect. She had seen a building and had had a thought, that the house was an illusion, and she examined the photo she had taken of it, but now, instead of a circular blue structure she saw a grass-thatched hut in the moonlight, a little girl with a flaming torch running out of it and into the bush to harvest white ants.… That girl. She could not see her face.
Was she really examining a still image, or was this data from Organic.sys?
She realized Organic.sys had generated a file with a strange extension, .drm, which security.sys attempted to delete. Mem.sys overrode it, and opened the file, which turned out to be a video file. Its metadata identified it as a dream.
I’ve had a dream? She was in sleep mode, after all.
A quick scan told her that in the past, when all her systems functioned properly, Organic.sys had generated .dro files to imitate real-life dreaming. But unlike the artificial dreams, this one was not in a three-dimensional space. She could not view the girl’s face from any angle. It was two-dimensional, like the images of a long-ago world that she stored in her Photos and Videos folder. She played the dream, then paused it at that moment when the girl came out of the hut, when her face was fully visible to the camera. Still, she could not see a face. Just a blank skin—no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no ears, not even a hairline, just a shiny metal ball on a neck. Though the video was paused, two holes appeared on the ball, imitative of eyes, and leaked rust that ran down like tears, creating a ghastly image. A lightning bolt of panic shot through Cana-B70, waking her up.
Nightmare, she realized. I’m having a nightmare.
A power surge. Overclocking. Processor overload. Overheating. Blackness.
* * *
When she auto-rebooted, daylight was breaking and the ice was melting. She stepped out of the tent. A hint of darkness lingered, mist enshrouding her camp, reducing visibility to only a few meters. Steam rose off the rocks like in the image of a kettle on a stove, an image from a time in the distant past that, without Organic.sys, she could not relate to. Then, like in the dream, it morphed from a static image into a moving picture, and she could not understand if she was experiencing the fragmented data stored in Organic.sys, or a video file.
A hand takes the kettle off the stove, and pours boiling water into a cup with a tea bag in it, and then the hand takes the cup to a face, but the face has no mouth to drink the tea. Like in the nightmare it has no features, just colored pixels. There is giggling, though. The person holding the camera, perhaps an elderly male, is saying something, and the person with the steaming cup, perhaps a little girl, is giggling. The colored pixels shimmer, and begin to bleed, and the video ends.
Is this a memory? Am I that girl?
Again, her systems froze, even though Organic.sys was not running. Security.sys searched for programs active in the background that could have caused the organic thought to occur, and it found a virtual library file that Organic.sys called upon to perform some activities. Assuming this the culprit, it shut it down. The system stabilized, and Cana-B70 went about her morning ritual.
First, she spread out the solar panels on her cart, unfurling them to cover an area four times the size of the cart, and then she hooked chargers into the tent’s battery, and into the port on her lower back. Then she sat still on the bicycle’s seat and waited for the juice to flow into her. A steady beeping marked the passage of time, growing stronger as the sun burst out of the mist. The last of the ice quickly evaporated, leaving a brazen sky overhead, bare gray rocks all around.
When her batteries were fully charged, the sun was at the ten o’clock position and already so fierce that she used both fans and liquid coolant to keep her internal temperature manageable, and she needed an umbrella that generated a cool micro-atmosphere. She then climbed the nearest rock, which was about eighty feet tall, and scanned the horizons for the house. Nothing.
Mem.sys then calculated that a large rock hid the house from her view, since she was now physically close to it. She preferred the other option, though, that it was an apparition, for it would be a clear sign, much clearer than the dreams, that the little girl who lived in Organic.sys was not dead. That she was still alive somewhere in there, and if she could find plastic filament for her 3D printer, or even bacterial ink, she could print out parts and revive her failing hardware. She climbed down from the rock, and rode her bicycle-cart in the general direction that she had seen the house.
She rode for about an hour, slowly, checking around every large rock, searching, and then she was going up a steep hill where the rocks were much shorter and packed close together in strange formations. At the top of the hill she found a plateau, and here the rocks were not haphazard acts of nature. They had been carefully placed together to form dry walls, the first sign of human civilization that she was seeing in nearly a whole year. An image in her archive compared them to the Great Dzimbabwe Monuments. Within the walls, flat stones had been stitched together to create artificial caves.
The caves had murals, which mem.sys compared to those in ancient sites with early human paintings. The drawings were of battle scenes. On closer analysis, mem.sys concluded they were made during an era they nicknamed The Great Burn, when the climate made the land uninhabitable. Whoever lived in these rock structures had been too poor to transform into androids, for the murals depicted people fighting humanoid machines. Yet the machines had identity. They had circles for eyes and a line for a mouth on squared heads. The people, in contrast, had no faces and their heads were smudges. They were stick figures, throwing spears and crude weapons at the refined metallic monsters, which were a foot taller than their tallest.
Copyright © 2022 by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight
