African Science Fiction and the Planning Imagination

This essay examines the recent rise in popularity of science fiction in Africa. I argue that this growth can be traced to key shifts within the logic of structural adjustment programs. Over the last twenty years, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have begun to place a heightened emphasis on "poverty reduction strategies" (or PRSs). These PRSs have taken the two organizations' longstanding commitment to free-market policies and adapted them to the rhetoric of social and economic justice by suggesting that sustainable welfare programs can only be constructed through the long-term benefits of well-planned "institutions." As I show, this vision of long-term development has encouraged a move toward fictional forms capable of speaking to elongated temporal scales. Using Nnedi Okorafor's novel Lagoon as my primary example, I investigate how sci-fi narratives have struggled to represent social agency within the longue duree of institutional planning.