The paper explores literary experimentation in novels in African languages, with a focus on Swahili and Shona science fiction and Afrofuturism. While science fiction is a genre whose relevance to Africa has often been questioned, Afrophone writers have produced sci-fi novels in several African languages and the genre seems to be experiencing a new interest in the 21st century. A number of novels contain visions of Africa's utopian or dystopian futures and often suggest ways to construct this future or, indeed, reconstruct the present in view of the future. The look at Africa from its imagined future also stimulates a rethinking of narratives about Africa's past. The paper outlines the history of sci-fi and futuristic prose in Swahili and in Shona and analyses the textual strategies which these novels employ to "write the future and the possible." ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Flora Veit-Wild and Clarissa Vierke, the two anonymous peer-reviewers, Anja Oed, Lutz Diegner, Jacob Mapara, and Benedetta Lanfranchi for their feedback, support and helpful suggestions. I would also like to thank Kevin Ochieng Okoth, Miriam Pahl, and Michelle Clarke for awakening me from a philosophical and literary "dogmatic slumber" and making me look in new directions.La Vie est ailleurs. The title of Milan Kundera's famous novel suggests that truth can only be captured through its "other," its "elsewhere." The French word, ailleurs, evokes the locative meanings less strongly than either the original Czech (jinde) or the English (elsewhere). Its etymology, probably the Vulgar Latin *aliore, shortened from *in aliore loco ("in another place," Trésor), shows why this is the case: the "place" (loco, nominative locus) is not expressed on the surface. I would like to use this French word in this paper instead of an English equivalent when referring to the far-off universes of science fiction and Afrofuturism, be they remote in time or in This is the version of the article accepted for publication in Research in African Literatures published by Indiana University Press: http://www.jstor.org/journal/reseafrilite Accepted version downloaded from SOAS Research Online: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/22865/ 2 space. The word will, in its meaning and its alienating, foreign form, evoke the necessity to first remove the illusory referent--the "actual world" or "objectivity"--if we wish to approximate "life."The genres of science fiction and Afrofuturism, exploring reality through unreality, exploit the potential of this ailleurs. They liberate language to speak to itself, to describe non-existent but possible worlds and make literature into an expression of human freedom; not of being slave to conventions, even if conscious of their conventionality.This article examines literary experimentation in novels in African languages, with a focus on Swahili and Shona science fiction and Afrofuturism. It looks at how these literatures "write the possible and the future." While the future can be seen as one type of possibility and it is indeed the ideal sc...
