Okorafor’s 2019 Definitions
On October 19, 2019, Nnedi Okorafor published “Africanfuturism Defined” on her personal blog, Nnedi’s Wahala Zone. By then, Binti had won the Hugo and Nebula awards, Who Fears Death had won the World Fantasy Award, and an HBO adaptation of the latter was in development with George R. R. Martin attached as an executive producer. Okorafor had spent years watching reviewers place her work under labels that she considered inaccurate. In her post, she supplied two alternatives.
She defined Africanfuturism as a subcategory of science fiction “specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and point-of-view as it then branches into the Black diaspora, and it does not privilege or center the West.” She also defined Africanjujuism as “a subcategory of fantasy that respectfully acknowledges the seamless blend of true existing African spiritualities and cosmologies with the imaginative.”
Okorafor used the two definitions to distinguish between different aspects of speculative fiction. Africanfuturism places Africa at the center of a narrative’s cultural and geographic perspective. With Africanjujuism, she described how fantasy writers engage with African spiritual systems that people continue to practice, inhabit, and understand as real.
By coining both terms, Okorafor also asserted her authority to classify her fiction. Critics, scholars, editors, and publishers often name genres after writers have already developed the work. Mark Dery coined “Afrofuturism” in his 1994 essay “Black to the Future,” which included interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. Dery used the term while examining African American science fiction and technological culture. Artists, writers, scholars, and readers across several generations subsequently applied the word to a much larger body of work. Because Dery introduced it within a particular intellectual and historical context, critics often began with his questions and treated the works associated with that context as central.
Okorafor named her own position. She gave critics a vocabulary based on the distinctions she saw within her work and declined to accept an inherited category that had become too broad for her purposes.
This blog adds Afromorphism to an already crowded discussion. It uses the word for a mode of African and Afro-diasporic fiction in which writers extend and transform African cosmological, folkloric, and spiritual systems. Okorafor has never used the term, and the argument made here should not be attributed to her. Critics should judge the term by whether it identifies a feature of fiction that Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism leave undescribed.
Specific books clarify the distinctions among the three terms.
The Limits of Afrofuturism
Dery rooted his original discussion of Afrofuturism in African American history. Scholars and critics later expanded the category, notably through Alondra Nelson’s Afrofuturism listserv and the 2002 special issue of Social Text that she edited. Writers and theorists also connected Afrofuturism to Sun Ra, George Clinton, Detroit techno, Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, and other artists concerned with Black life, technology, estrangement, and possible futures.
Critics often examined Africa in this body of work through diasporic memory. Artists presented the continent as a place of origin, an ancestral reference, an imagined homeland, or a source of recovered symbols. Many African American artists emphasized these ideas because of their specific historical concerns. The same critical framework accounts less reliably for fiction grounded in the daily life, languages, politics, and spiritual traditions of African countries.
Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014) stages first contact in Lagos. Its aliens arrive near Bar Beach and encounter a city already populated by human communities, marine life, masquerades, spirits, preachers, soldiers, and other powers with competing claims. Okorafor builds the novel’s social structure and narrative pressure from Lagos itself. She presents the city as neither a symbolic homeland nor an African setting surrounding a story based on assumptions from elsewhere.
In Binti (2015), a Himba girl leaves home to attend Oomza University on another planet. Binti carries otjize, the ochre-and-butterfat paste associated with Himba care of skin and hair. By applying and carrying it, she maintains her connection to family, place, and embodied knowledge. She also discovers new uses for it during her encounter with the Meduse. Readers unfamiliar with otjize learn through Binti’s handling of it and through the reactions of other characters. The book does not treat a Western reader’s knowledge as the universal baseline.
Okorafor illustrated the distinction through Black Panther. In her account, a story in which Wakanda establishes an outpost in Oakland would follow an Afrofuturist orientation. A story in which Wakanda establishes an outpost in a neighboring African country would follow an Africanfuturist one. Wakanda and its technology remain the same, while writers would organize each story around different communities, histories, and political relationships.
Mohale Mashigo raised a related objection in the preface to her 2018 collection Intruders, published separately under the title “Afrofuturism Is Not for Africans Living in Africa.” Mashigo described Afrofuturism as a diasporic project concerned with recovering identities disrupted through enslavement and displacement. Africans living on the continent have different histories of rupture, continuity, colonization, and cultural change. Writers working from those conditions may therefore require a different vocabulary.
Other writers have been skeptical of proliferating labels. Tade Thompson, author of Rosewater, has criticized descriptions of African science fiction as newly “rising.” Critics who use such language can obscure a longer history of writing, publication, and oral storytelling by implying that the work began when international publishers or prize institutions noticed it. Hope Wabuke, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2020, examined how Dery’s coinage affected later discussions of Black speculative literature and how Black writers had to negotiate a category first proposed by an outside critic.
These arguments do not require the rejection of Afrofuturism. They identify the limits of applying one diasporic framework to every form of African and Black speculative work. With her definitions, Okorafor gave readers and writers a more exact way to discuss where a story situates its ordinary world, whose perspective the writer adopts, and what the writer chooses to explain.
Africanfuturism and Narrative Perspective
Okorafor’s Africanfuturism places African settings, histories, and points of view at the center of science fiction. The definition covers more than geography. A novel set in Lagos can still explain the city entirely for an imagined Western visitor. A story set on another planet can remain rooted in an African character’s language, memory, social obligations, and understanding of the world.
In Binti, Okorafor establishes Binti’s Himba knowledge before introducing the galactic university that has admitted her. Binti understands otjize, family duty, mathematical harmonizing, and the social consequences of leaving home. She encounters Oomza University and the Meduse with a consciousness already formed elsewhere. Readers experience the galaxy through Binti’s judgments, fears, and competencies.
Noor (2021) similarly draws its future from northern Nigeria. Markets, corporate agriculture, bodily modification, nomadic communities, and environmental violence converge around AO, a woman whose prosthetic body makes her both powerful and vulnerable. She knows the harmattan and regional political tensions as part of her environment. Okorafor develops the Red Eye, an immense technological and climatic phenomenon, within that setting.
Writers can use Africanfuturism to guide decisions about exposition. Every speculative narrative assumes that some things are familiar and others need interpretation. The writer chooses which foods receive glosses, which forms of kinship require explanation, whose speech becomes marked as dialect, and which institutions appear ordinary. Those decisions indicate the reader a book imagines and the culture its writer treats as a reference point.
Readers can also use the term to distinguish cultural unfamiliarity from invented speculation. Otjize exists outside Binti. The Meduse belong to the novella’s imagined universe. A reader who treats both as equally invented misses part of the book’s construction. Reviewers who describe African cultural practices as exotic worldbuilding can misrepresent ordinary or sacred elements of a community’s life as decorative fantasy.
Africanfuturism does not require any particular cosmology. A materially focused novel about water infrastructure in a future Nairobi could fit Okorafor’s definition without spirits, deities, divination, or mythic beings. The category describes the story’s center of reference and its relationship to science fiction. Okorafor coined Africanjujuism for works whose authors draw from living spiritual traditions.
Africanjujuism and Living Spiritual Traditions
Okorafor’s definition of Africanjujuism includes the phrase “true existing African spiritualities and cosmologies.” With this wording, she asks readers to recognize that a fantasy writer may draw from systems that communities practice and understand as real. Writers who use such material undertake ethical and interpretive obligations different from those involved in creating a wholly invented pantheon.
In Akata Witch (2011), Okorafor builds her world of Leopard People with cultural material from Nigeria and the wider region. Nsibidi, a system of signs associated with communities and institutions in southeastern Nigeria and neighboring areas, becomes a living form of communication in the novel. Okorafor develops a speculative setting around this material while retaining its connection to histories beyond the book.
Masquerades in Akata Warrior and the Night Masquerade in the Binti trilogy also draw upon traditions in which participants may understand the masked presence as more than a person wearing a costume. Practices and interpretations vary among communities, and no single fictional use can represent them all. A responsible writer must account for the religious and social relationships that give masquerade meaning. Presenting such a figure as a generic monster would remove those relationships.
Okorafor’s use of the word “juju” introduces a further complication. Europeans often used it as a dismissive label for West African religious objects and practices. Its etymology remains contested, with proposed origins including the French joujou and West African languages. Okorafor chose to reclaim it, yet some writers and practitioners reject that reclamation because they consider the word too closely tied to colonial descriptions of African religion as superstition.
Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Joshua Uchenna Omenga proposed “Afropantheology” in connection with the 2023 collection Between Dystopias: The Road to Afropantheology. In their framing, they challenge the placement of African spiritual realities under fantasy. When communities regard spirits, ancestors, and divine powers as real, critics who describe those presences as fantasy can reproduce the assumptions of observers who dismissed the traditions in the first place.
Terminology alone cannot resolve that dispute. Publishers still need shelving categories, critics still compare books, and writers still combine remembered, researched, practiced, and invented material. Participants in the debate nevertheless focus on who defines reality inside and outside the text. A critic may call an event supernatural because it falls outside that critic’s worldview, even when the book and the tradition informing it recognize no such division.
Critics can also apply Africanjujuism to works written long before Okorafor coined the term. D. O. Fagunwa’s Ògbójú Ọdẹ nínú Igbó Irúnmalẹ̀ appeared in 1938 and was later translated by Wole Soyinka as The Forest of a Thousand Daemons. Fagunwa follows a Yoruba hunter through a forest inhabited by spiritual beings, dangers, communities, and moral tests. Although Fagunwa constructed the forest for a literary work, he drew its structure from Yoruba narrative and cosmological traditions.
Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) follows a narrator into the land of the dead in search of his deceased palm-wine tapster. Among the book’s best-known figures is the Complete Gentleman, whose attractive body consists of rented parts that he returns one by one. Tutuola adapted material from Yoruba oral traditions while developing a written style whose syntax and movement defied the expectations of English-language critics. Early reviewers sometimes treated his work as naïve, a judgment shaped as much by colonial ideas about language and literature as by the books themselves.
Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) is narrated by Azaro, an abiku or spirit-child whose ties to the spirit world affect his life among the living. Critics frequently used magical realism to describe the novel. Okri resisted that classification because it could imply that spirits enter an otherwise self-evidently material reality as impossible disruptions. Azaro experiences reality according to a different cosmological account.
Critics can use Africanjujuism to describe the relationship between these books and the spiritual traditions their authors draw upon. They must still evaluate each work carefully. A label cannot guarantee informed representation, community accountability, or artistic success. Writers can acknowledge a tradition and still simplify it, combine incompatible practices, strip sacred figures from their obligations, or present contested interpretations as settled fact.
The proposed term Afromorphism concerns a related craft question: how does a writer transform inherited material after choosing to work with it?
Afromorphism as a Transformative Method
Afromorphism describes the imaginative extension of African and Afro-diasporic cosmologies, myths, and spiritual systems. The term applies when a writer identifies relationships within inherited material and develops new characters, institutions, conflicts, or settings from them. Readers and practitioners who know the source tradition can then evaluate the resulting work.
Wole Talabi’s Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon (2023) offers a useful example. Talabi draws his title character from the ṣìgìdì, a clay figure associated in some Yoruba accounts with spiritual protection or attack. His novel gives Shigidi a consciousness, a history of service, and desires that exceed the role assigned to him.
Talabi also imagines the Orisha Spirit Company, an organization in which divine beings operate through corporate structures. Through contracts, performance expectations, and institutional rivalries, he adapts relationships among worship, offerings, power, and obligation to a corporate setting. He bases the company on his interpretation of divine and human reciprocity within Yoruba religious thought, then develops that interpretation through contemporary corporate life.
This blog uses deepening for the first of those procedures. Talabi develops the interior life of a figure whose role in an earlier account may be brief or instrumental. A writer can deepen a messenger, monster, ancestor, deity, or trickster by asking what that figure knows, desires, remembers, and fears.
The blog uses abstraction for a second procedure. A writer studies a recurring relationship within the source material, such as reciprocity between worshippers and divine powers, and adapts that relationship to a new institution or setting. Readers should judge the result according to the accuracy and discernment of the writer’s interpretation. A shallow abstraction can reduce religion to a single exchange. A stronger one preserves tensions, limits, obligations, and contradictions that the community itself recognizes.
Okorafor’s Lagoon also combines cosmological material with speculative invention. Aliens land off the coast of Lagos, but the city already contains nonhuman powers before their arrival. The novel includes Udide Okwanka, a great spider associated with storytelling, along with masquerades, marine beings, and the dangerous figure on the road often called the Bone Collector.
By placing Udide in the narrative, Okorafor situates the alien arrival among powers whose history precedes it. The visitors enter a place where human institutions share authority with forces they do not control. The people and beings of Lagos recognize multiple accounts of life, agency, territory, and obligation. The aliens create new conflicts among those existing relationships.
Readers can describe Lagoon as Africanfuturist because it presents science fiction from Lagos and does not use the West as its primary reference point. They can also describe its treatment of Udide and masquerade through Africanjujuism. With Afromorphism, critics can identify how Okorafor develops cosmological figures within a new crisis. She imagines their responses to extraterrestrial arrival, environmental change, religious opportunism, political violence, and mass communication.
Critics can apply the same approach across ordinary genre divisions. Marlon James draws on many African histories and mythic traditions in the secondary-world fantasy Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Okorafor’s Who Fears Death places spiritual power within a post-apocalyptic landscape marked by ethnic violence, gendered violence, and political struggle. Its protagonist, Onyesonwu, carries an Igbo name that translates as “Who fears death?” Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring brings Afro-Caribbean spiritual practice into a near-future Toronto abandoned by public institutions. Ti-Jeanne’s grandmother, Gros-Jeanne, serves spirits and possesses knowledge that becomes essential to survival.
These books differ in genre, setting, and cultural source. Critics using Afromorphism can compare how their authors adapt inherited systems, provided that the comparisons remain specific. Yoruba, Igbo, Akan, Vodou, Orisha, and other traditions cannot be collapsed into a shared catalogue of African magic. Each work requires attention to the particular histories, communities, languages, and religious relationships from which its author draws.
Writers adapting inherited material must combine research with craft. Identifying a compelling figure is only the beginning. The writer must understand the figure’s relationships, prohibitions, social role, and range of interpretations before developing new inventions from those elements. Readers can move beyond a vague search for authenticity by asking more precise questions: Which source does the book use? What has the writer changed? What remains recognizable? Who bears the consequences of the change?
Diasporic Cosmologies and Invented Myths
Afromorphism also includes traditions that communities developed in the African diaspora. Vodou, Santería, Candomblé, Hoodoo, and related systems arose through particular histories of enslavement, conversion, concealment, adaptation, resistance, and exchange. Their African inheritances remain central, while their forms in the Americas have their own histories and authorities.
In Brown Girl in the Ring, Hopkinson places Afro-Caribbean religious knowledge within a Toronto altered by economic abandonment and predatory power. Gros-Jeanne practices her religion within family and community. Ti-Jeanne cannot treat that inheritance as a convenient collection of spells because accepting it changes her responsibilities. Through the characters’ practices, the novel develops relationships of kinship, healing, protection, danger, and obligation.
Okorafor begins her definition of Africanfuturism on the continent and extends it into the diaspora. In defining Africanjujuism, she refers to African spiritualities and cosmologies, a phrase that may include diasporic traditions without explicitly accounting for their distinct development. Critics can apply Afromorphism to both continental and diasporic works when they identify the relevant tradition and attend to its history.
Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019) presents a more difficult case. Solomon developed the book from a song by the experimental hip-hop group clipping. The song drew upon the mythology created by Drexciya, a Detroit electronic music duo. In that mythology, children born to pregnant African women thrown from slave ships survive underwater and form a new civilization.
The wajinru in Solomon’s novella do not come from a documented precolonial cosmology or an established religious community. Black musicians created their collective story in response to the history of the Middle Passage. Later artists extended it across music and fiction. Each version changes the mythology while retaining its central relation to enslaved African women, underwater survival, collective memory, and the cost of carrying historical trauma.
Calling this mythology a “true existing spirituality” would stretch Okorafor’s definition beyond its clear wording. Calling The Deep Africanfuturist would also require explanation because Solomon drew from sources associated with Detroit and the Black Atlantic. Critics can use Afromorphism to describe how Solomon transforms an Afro-diasporic myth inherited from earlier artists.
This case also shows how answerability applies to recently invented mythology. A writer can be answerable to a recent artistic source as well as to an older oral or religious tradition. Solomon remains in conversation with clipping. and Drexciya, while the artists responsible for all three works remain accountable to the history from which they developed the mythology. The standards differ from those involved in adapting a living religion. They still require accurate acknowledgment, careful transformation, and attention to the people whose suffering made the myth possible.
The Value and Risk of New Terms
Coining labels can impose costs. Publishers can turn critical vocabulary into marketing language stripped of history. Scholars and reviewers can police boundaries more vigorously than they interpret books. Writers may find themselves asked to prove their nationality, ancestry, residence, or cultural authority before anyone discusses their sentences.
Debates about Africanfuturism show how quickly critics can turn description into a test of identity. Can an African American writer produce Africanfuturism? How should critics describe a British-Nigerian writer whose family history, education, residence, and readership span several countries? Should critics classify a book according to its author, setting, intended audience, or narrative perspective? No short definition can settle every case.
Thompson bases his skepticism on the experience of writers whose work is repeatedly sorted into new categories while publishers continue to offer limited space to African speculative fiction. A reviewer may gain precision from a label, but the label alone does not improve publishing access, editorial knowledge, payment, distribution, or preservation. Institutions decide which terms become visible and which books receive support.
Poor classification also has consequences. Critics treated Tutuola’s language as evidence of artistic innocence. Reviewers placed Okri within a Latin American critical framework that did not fully account for the abiku. Okorafor saw critics interpret her Lagos-centered and Himba-centered fiction through a category developed around African American cultural concerns. In each case, the vocabulary available to critics affected what readers noticed and what they overlooked.
Africanfuturism distinguishes stories centered on African places and perspectives from speculative work organized primarily through diasporic experience. Africanjujuism identifies fiction that draws upon African spiritual systems whose practitioners understand them as living realities. Afromorphism describes how writers extend cosmological and mythic material through characterization, structure, setting, and speculative change.
Critics should use the third term only when it improves their interpretation of a work. An Afromorphic analysis requires more than the appearance of Anansi. A writer may use the name as decoration while ignoring the stories, relationships, and ethical questions attached to the figure. A stronger example would involve a novelist who studies Anansi’s narrative logic, develops it in a new setting, and remains accountable to the tradition.
Readers using Afromorphism can ask questions more exact than a general demand for authenticity. Which version of a tradition does the writer use? What communities recognize that version? Which features has the writer retained, and which have changed? Does the adaptation preserve the source’s relationships and obligations? Do the changes reveal something about the inherited material, the new setting, or both?
For writers, the term describes a demanding practice. Research includes reading literary and scholarly sources, attending to differences among communities, and listening to practitioners where access is appropriate. Writers should base their inventions on the relationships already present in the material, without treating names, masks, symbols, and divine figures as interchangeable components of a fantasy setting.
Last week, this blog discussed the story in which Anansi acquires the sky god’s stories after capturing a python, a leopard, hornets, and a spirit. Anansi earns the right to have the stories bear his name by completing the required labor. His achievement links naming with authority and obligation.
Okorafor wrote her 2019 post because she believed that an existing name had distorted the reception of her fiction. By defining Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism, she stated where her work began and how she understood its relationship to African spiritual traditions. Critics can debate the limits of those terms, and other writers may choose different ones. They should ground their disagreements in actual books, specific traditions, and the conditions under which writers create.
Critics should use Afromorphism when they can identify an observable feature of a work: the writer has taken inherited cosmological material, understood some part of its organizing logic, and developed new fiction from it. They misuse the term when they treat it as a prestige label, a guarantee of authenticity, or a substitute for studying the traditions involved.
Critics must still interpret each book in detail. Afromorphism has value only when it helps readers notice features that earlier readings overlooked.