Afrofuturism: Speculation and Prediction
Science fiction has long been a way to speculate about what’s to come. Often, these speculations had some merit to them. Science fiction writers and filmmakers are notorious for putting a lot of effort, thought, and research into the futures and alternate realities they invent. It’s fun to look back and see Captain Kirk essentially using Facetime alongside teleportation. While the creators of Star Trek may have been a bit off when it comes to timing, they took technology that existed at the time, telephones for example, and asked: how might this be improved. What do you know, fifty years later our tech looks a lot like that on board the Enterprise. Afrofuturism is no different when it comes to speculation.
Predictions in science fiction are not always positive. In Tananarive Due’s short story, Herd Immunity, published in 2014, she writes about a plague that ravaged the world, leaving the few immune to survive on their own. While COVID hasn’t decimated the population in the same way, Due predicted the very real social and psychological affect of a pandemic. While many of us felt alone, terrified of what was to come next, Due’s character Nayima really IS alone. The joy she feels when she finally finds another human is comparable, on a smaller scale, to how many of us felt when restrictions began to lighten, and her actions have consequences the same way ours did. The other character in the story, we’ll call him Guitar Guy, as he never tells us his real name, is much more careful about his health than Nayima. Her carelessness, caused by her desperate need for human touch, directly caused his death to the horrific “seventy two hour flu”. This could easily be compared to the rise in infection rates every time a COVID restriction is lifted, and is an excellent example of Afrofuturism predicting the future in a dark way.
Afrofuturism and science fiction are not exclusively set in the future, set to make future predictions. These stories can also be set in alternate timelines, speculating about what could have been. This takes just as much research, arguably more, to accurately predict, and an excellent example of a well-thought out piece of speculative Afrofuturism is Steven Barnes’ Lion’s Blood series. Barnes asked himself, “What could have happened in history to lead to Africa colonizing the Americas instead of Europe?”. He spent years researching anthropology, history, and geography, and decided upon one figure that could have changed the course of history: Socrates. In the world of Lion’s Blood, Socrates doesn’t drink the hemlock, but flees Athens to Egypt. This leads to Alexander the Great being sent to Egypt, and this all leads to Egypt beginning to take control of the Mediterranean. By altering this tiny detail, Barnes created a whole new world, which is just as impressive as predicting events and technologies in our world.
