Futures Forestalled … for Now: South African Science Fiction and Futurism

Abstract

While the term ‘Afrofuturism’ has entered the global popular lexicon and is appropriately used to describe films like Black Panther, the term’s descriptive potential is necessarily culturally bound. In this article, I argue that the term is bound to an African-American context and that it cannot slip shoddily be applied to futuristic texts by African creatives in Africa. To problematise the term’s application in an African context, I provide an historical overview of futuristic speculative fictions (novels, films, and video games) from southern Africa, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century and concluding with the present.