Okorafor’s Binti series consistently blurs the lines between human and other-than-human, between technological and natural/spiritual, between local and global in ways that refuse to extract or abstract humans from their entanglements with environments and others, writ large and small. Set in a post–climate change Africa embroiled in regional and interstellar conflict, the narratives’ cosmopolitics are unrelentingly ecological, involving nonhuman participants and embedded in material particularities that shape conflicts and relations; at the same time, the ecology is always cosmopolitan, with those nonhuman actors exercising agency within complex worlds of difference that cross over and connect cosmos, polis, and oikos. Contrary to the sometimes-utopic connotation of both cosmopolitanism and ecology, however, such difference is neither subsumed to a harmonious whole, nor held in benign relativism. Rather, Binti depicts multispecies agency that is always in dynamic tension, driving r/evolutionary growth in posthuman relations and in the genres through which we imagine them.

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 durée of institutional planning.

Nnedi Okorafor is a member of a growing vanguard of global SF/F authors who challenge the hegemony of SF as a purely Western genre. This decentering of SF foremost demands a critical engagement with its dominant, operative tropes. In this light, Lagoon subverts the stock colonial ideology long associated with the first contact alien invasion narrative. Drawing on Afrofuturist criticism, this essay argues that Lagoon utilizes the figure of the alien in order to examine Nigeria as both an object of the neoliberal futures industry and a progenitor of radical anti-neoimperial futurity. Rather than merely incorporating the predominantly Americentric determinations of much Afrofuturist thought wholesale, however, the novel demands a rethinking of the role of the alien from an African-utopian perspective. Ultimately, this requires a reconsideration of the work of the SF novum itself in line with Alain Badiou’s conception of the event, whereby the introduction of the SF novum of the alien can be seen as a placeholder for the unknowable, unforeseeable eruption of a radical, historical event: the reawakening of a seemingly structurally unrepresentable anticolonial subjectivity that is pitched against the ideological confines of the neoliberal present.