The speculative nature of science fiction often segues into imagined futures that insist on a better world in the form of aspirational utopias. This generative utopian capacity, however, assumes greater significance in a postcolonial context, like Africa, where various liberation struggles and nations were, and are, ideologically informed by future-oriented utopian ideals. Arguably then, there is sociopolitical value in the ways in which writers of African science fictionFootnote ¹ conceive of their utopias as shifting postcolonial landscapes are usefully realized through the increasingly ambivalent deployment of science fiction utopias. Through an examination of Sarah Lotz’s “Home Affairs,” Tendai Huchu’s “The Sale,” and Nick Wood’s “Azania,” three short stories all found in the AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers Vol I (2012) anthology, I argue that these narratives demonstrate how the human impulse and the African postcolonial project lies contrary to the objectives of sterile utopias; using tropes of contagion, these authors seek to contaminate the notion of utopia itself. In turn, they allow for compelling conceptual mutations of utopia that duly expands the ambit of utopian studies and science fiction at large.

In “The Utopian Fantastic” Lisa Dowdall states that utopia is a “desire to be filled, the dream that wants to come to life but does not yet know how.”Footnote ² Often perceived as ethereal and fantastic in nature, utopia has profound effects when utilized as the dynamic narrative force for political transformation. As Agnes Keller explains, “Utopia is ‘somewhere else’; what is here and now is precisely what Utopia is not. That which Utopia is not, is termed ‘reality.’”Footnote ³ The utopic imagination—fueled by resistance to the present—bears great potential for ahistorical escapism, but Keller also illustrates how utopias often find relevance in historical time by undergoing eschatological interpretation. She states that “the timeless can be imagined, and normally also thought, only in and by time, that which is to be expected only in future time.”Footnote ⁴ Hence, the timeless “nowhere” of utopia is most likely to be perceived as an imminent future event and, in this manner, Keller suggests that by situating utopian impulses in time, we can exploit its ethical or moral drive to carry us beyond merely escapist ideals.

This has never been truer than in the African context where the utopian imagination has proven necessary to alleviate the trauma of colonialism and current circumstances of strife while simultaneously providing a blueprint for potential postcolonial development.Footnote ⁵ Rightly noted by Gerald Gaylard in After Colonialism, “utopias invariably suggest changing the current state of affairs”Footnote ⁶ and use nationalism as a mode of resistance (both to and in the present) in the pursuit and creation of newer and freer sociopolitical realities. Moreover, the utopian strain of postcolonial narrativity also works in response to colonial legacies, and it is not uncommon for these utopias to actively resist hegemonic interpretations of Africa.

In On the Postcolony, Achille Mbembe states that Africa is often a negative interpretation that serves to account for what the West is not. Africa is seen as “resistant to change. . . . The idea of progress is said to disintegrate in such societies; should change occur—rare indeed—it would, as of necessity, follow a disordered trajectory and fortuitous path ending only in undifferentiated chaos.”Footnote ⁷ Stemming from the Enlightenment, the “dark continent” of Africa is often perceived as inherently tardy or stagnant in the global imaginary and serves to incite feelings of hopelessness as it is bound by fundamental laws of chaos and anti-progressiveness. Hence, there is grave political importance in the creative investment of African science fiction utopias where “a more perfect society [is] the result of evolution and technology.”Footnote ⁸

Yet according to Michelle Reid, “SF is usually narrated by the inheritors of advancement, often assumed to be white, Western, and on an adventure,”Footnote ⁹ which sets an onerous task for the postcolonial writer who must engage more carefully with the tenuous politics of power, technology, and representation when transposing science fiction utopias that have previously housed colonial and imperialistic fantasies. Similarly, Ivor Hartmann, editor of the AfroSF anthology argues:

Hartmann implies that there is much at stake for Africa in how science fiction writers tell its stories. Unlike the new freedoms currently experienced by many African writers who have taken to popular genre fiction, science fiction offers no easy respite. The difference with science fiction, it seems, is that it is impossible to not read the ideals of the postcolonial project as embodied in the genre and its ability to construct futuristic utopias. In response to this dilemma, Reid notes that postcolonial science fiction writers are prone to “parodying utopian societies as a sign of the inflexibility of essentialist Western values while simultaneously celebrating utopian thought’s potential for social transformation.”Footnote ¹¹ Assuming a challenge of this kind in “Home Affairs,” Lotz takes a satirical approach to the realization of a techno-scientific utopia in South Africa and instead limns the humane prospects and the joy involved in its inevitable contamination.

“Home Affairs” imagines a future South Africa where current frustrations with government bureaucracy have been addressed through the installation of robots, called Konabots, in the Department of Home Affairs. Citizens are no longer at the mercy of corrupt and inefficient government workers, and the protagonist, a young African girl named Pendi, is enthused by these technological upgrades because “she can’t imagine the Konabots siphoning off taxpayers’ money to buy BMWs and Boeings or taking kickbacks from arms manufacturers.”Footnote ¹² Here Lotz appropriates the idea of a techno-scientific utopia to contest Western essentialism; Africa is not invariably prone to states of underdevelopment and chaos as systematicity and technological advancement are central features of Africa’s future.Footnote ¹³ More specifically, Pendi prizes the Konabots because “you can’t bribe a machine, can you? You can’t corrupt a robot.”Footnote ¹⁴ The Konabots are nonporous entities that cannot be infected by human vice or their African context. They are free from contagion. Lotz’s utopia is thus one of technological advancement but also that of a “blinding white”Footnote ¹⁵ sterile world where the inoculation against current “plagues” like crime, corruption, and underdevelopment alludes to the underpinnings of an “outbreak narrative”Footnote ¹⁶ that is duly interrogated in this story.

In Contagious, Priscilla Wald explores how the “commingling of theories about microbes and attitudes of social change” has given rise to a popular recurrence of what she terms as an “outbreak narrative” that rehearses “a contradictory but compelling story of the perils of human interdependence and the triumph of human connection and cooperation, scientific authority and the evolutionary advantages of the microbe, ecological balance and impending disaster.”Footnote ¹⁷ She also notes how “the disease is associated with dangerous practices and behaviors that allegedly mark intrinsic cultural difference, and it expresses the destructive transformative power of the group.”Footnote ¹⁸ In particular, immigrants and third-world spaces—usually in Africa—are viewed as sites of initial infection that place the entire world in danger. In the heroic upturn of the outbreak narrative, it is the first world, possessing all the necessary techno-scientific resources, that saves humanity from the threat of Africa.Footnote ¹⁹ Based on Wald’s description of the outbreak narrative, the desire for a sterile utopia is a first-world fantasy that confirms and justifies capitalistic imperialism at the expensive of Africa as other, which then makes its unquestioned reproduction in African science fiction counterintuitive. “Home Affairs,” however, has the protagonist attest to a fantasy of this kind. Yet Lotz dabbles in heavy-handed irony as Pendi is forced to engage contagion, which ultimately leads to a recognition of its necessity on both a mundane and a structural level.

Rather quickly, Pendi becomes annoyed by the monotony of the Konabots; “Jesus, Pendi thinks. She’s been listening to this all morning. It’s enough to drive you mad. She almost misses the snappish sadists who were lurking behind the counters the last time she was here.”Footnote ²⁰ This techno-scientific world proves so mechanistic that variation, improvisation, and surprise have been eliminated from daily interactions. Somewhat typically, Lotz highlights how sterile utopias flatten out the cultural milieu which, according to Edward James’s suggestion, can lead to boredom and the loss of creativity.Footnote ²¹ Moving beyond the mundane, Lotz illustrates how contagion is also a structural feature necessary for human existence.

Based in a country with eleven official languages and numerous racial and ethnic groups, the Konabot is programmed to deliver an all-encompassing and formulaic address that aims to communicate with all citizens; “hello goeie more sawubona how are you today sir madam”Footnote ²² is what it spews out as a greeting. The Konabot’s speech, however, lacks intelligibility. The desire to be comprehensive is rendered impractical and absurd, and Lotz is successful in highlighting how this technological feat carries its own “tinge of lunacy.”Footnote ²³ In this manner the text asks us to consider how the Konabots, as purveyors of “neutralized” language are, in fact, muddying communication. In addition, the old lady with whom the Konabot engages cannot understand her because it is unable to adjust to her idiolect. The encounter becomes frustrating precisely because, as Humberto Maturana argues, language must allow for levels of porosity and contamination for successful communication to ensue.

In “Biology of Language,” Maturana asserts that linguistic systems are comparable to biological ones. Both require a process of coupling between entities in order for consensual domains to arise and communication to ensue. The consensual domain is, however, distinct from the entities that produce it, which means that entities are required to be “structurally plastic.”Footnote ²⁴ Once the domain is firmly established, recursive communication can occur, but in order to allow for novel encounters there is a need for “a domain of expanding ambient diversity.”Footnote ²⁵ Maturana argues that these novel encounters are acts of creativity; organisms and linguistic domains need to learn how to interact and mutate in order to become structurally coupled. As illustrated in “Home Affairs,” communication is stunted because the Konabot has been programmed to operate in just one generic linguistic domain and is incapable of drawing from the idiolect of others. Its lack of linguistic plasticity makes it fundamentally hermetic. Without the ability to absorb foreign “contagion” from others, it remains uncommunicative.

When Pendi intervenes on behalf of the old lady, the Konabot deems her impertinent and sends her down a dark chute into the underworld where Pendi “can hear the skitter of rodent claws.”Footnote ²⁶ Again, the frustration of communication is made known as Pendi tries to phone the Home Affairs call center to lodge a complaint but the agent (sitting in an outsourced office in Mumbai) informs her that he cannot assist because there is no longer a record of her in the system. Pendi is furious but, determined to get herself back in the system, she learns that she can do so only by taking the illegal route and making a trip to see a man called Busi.

Busi is “an elderly man with yellowed eyes” who “looks more like a washed up office drone than a gangster,” but that does not deter Pendi from asking, “How do I know you’re not some con-man or rapist or whatever?”Footnote ²⁷ She resents that she has to engage in criminal activity, and her undue suspicion of Busi reverts to unfortunate stereotypes of black men.Footnote ²⁸ He proceeds to take her into the aptly named “bowels”Footnote ²⁹ of Home Affairs, which is populated by a number of “identity refugees,”Footnote ³⁰ implying that the success of the Konabots relies on diagnosing contaminated strains of language and social deviance in order for it to be emitted from the colon of society. As Busi explains, “They are cleaning up the system, getting rid of the bad seeds, that’s their job. The powers that be don’t care. Far as they’re concerned, the system is running smoothly. No corruption means no problems.”Footnote ³¹ Here the extended metaphor is that of a sociopolitical system as a biological or human body whose health relies on inoculating itself against germs and efficiently discarding its waste.

Wald argues that it is not uncommon for nations to imagine their borders in relation to contagion. Discussing the emergence of the biopolitical state in response to Michel Foucault’s research, she highlights how “the concept of public health was formative for modern society, and epidemics were important because they manifested the need for protection in the form of regimented social behaviour.”Footnote ³² The state thus incorporates contagion into nationalistic discourse by imagining that its borders police the entry of disease and its carriers. By entrenching a national identity in a desire to remain contagion free, the practice of good citizenry involves regular access to public health systems. Wald cautions, however, that “the emergence of institutions, policies and practices” actively shapes “the contours of a ‘population.’”Footnote ³³ Hence, good citizenry becomes predetermined by the state and is used as a mode of instruction and control in order to fortify concepts such as national pride and cultural difference.

In “Home Affairs” it thus follows that Pendi was in line because a blood sample had been requested by the state in order to secure her citizenship and, at the first sign of deviant behavior, she loses her “status,” her “identity.”Footnote ³⁴ Like the other refugees, who are all “filthy” and living in “desperation,”Footnote ³⁵ she exists outside of the state’s utopian border and no longer has access to any of its resources after refusing to comply. She now navigates a space replete with “slimy brickwork,”Footnote ³⁶ “pungent odours of mould and urine,”Footnote ³⁷ and “walls sprawled with graffiti: ‘Abandun hop all ye who enter hear,’ ‘I fuked a konabit and got AIDS.’”Footnote ³⁸ The presence of graffiti and the badly spelled words and poorly constructed sentences are illegal “grammars” that definitively mark a contagion zone. Yet, ironically, unlike the nonsensical speech of the Konabot, these serve as revelatory: the first sentence makes us aware of the spatial distinction that applies and the second puts forward the suggestion that the Konabots breed infection and create the very problem they are now employed to supress. Having crossed the divide, Pendi is able to notice the sharp discrepancies between the contagion zone and the state-sponsored national identity that the Konabots enforce. She sees that a sterile utopia is only ever an illusion of purity that inherently inscribes a corresponding space for contagion that it must deny. Pendi realizes that she needs to be complicit in Busi’s scheme in order to get herself back in the system—there is no escaping the taint of crime.

Busi informs her that the “bowels”Footnote ³⁹ are the old Home Affairs offices that are now used to store the broken and discarded Konabots that, in his entrepreneurial capacity, he uses to put people back in to the system for a small fee. Pendi “stares in at the graveyard of dented, damaged Konabots. Some are nothing but decapitated torsos, their featureless heads thrown carelessly on the carpet next to them. . . . Complex circuitry tumbles out of their bases like eviscerated innards.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This is an interesting passage in the story; Lotz personifies and thus grants mortality—and all its visceral humiliations—to the Konabots. The illusion of their efficacy is literally disemboweled in front of Pendi and, as she learns, exploitable as a result. Busi instructs her that she must find “the corrupted one”Footnote ⁴¹ with the right kind of manufacturing flaw to put her back in the system. When she finds one, “The automated voice drags at half-speed; its too-low timbre sounds almost demonic.”Footnote ⁴² Tellingly, the contaminated speech offers the language option of “entrails”Footnote ⁴³ instead of English, and she affirms that she would like to communicate with it in “entrails.” It is indeed ironic that after their exchange, the corrupt Konabot successfully resets and restores Pendi’s status as a citizen of South Africa as Pendi was unable to complete this task in the Department of Home Affairs. Following a path of contagion, however, has amounted in success. As can be evidenced here, “Home Affairs” does not conclude with a radical revaluation of national identity but intimates that it should be more inclusive of contagion as it proves to be the very thing that Pendi relies on to maintain her citizenry in the end. We are encouraged to think of contagion in symbiotic terms as opposed to that which parasitically opposes utopia as Lotz illustrates how it is inherent to all acts of communication, efficiency, and technological advancement.

Yet, despite this, the narrative makes an anticlimactic conclusion: once Busi helps Pendi back in to the system, she berates him for exploiting identity refugees and calls him a criminal. Although she is sympathetic that Busi has lost his job to the Konabots, she is not impressed by his entrepreneurial approach to survival. She thinks it regrettable that corruption begets further corruption and implies that justice can never thrive in a world governed by such scarcity. Yet despite her vexation with bureaucracy and Busi’s opportunism, she returns to the world and proceeds with “life as normal.” The story thus ends with the flippant sentiment that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Through the employment of an ostensibly innocent cliché, Lotz ultimately returns Africa to notions of an incurable plague. It is condemned to backwardness or temporal stagnancy that negates any expression of agency and makes the future an entirely inapplicable temporal mode in this context. As a result, Pendi’s dystopian despair implies that a sterile utopia is an act of hubris in the African context. In spite of the earlier ironic treatment of the outbreak narrative and the immanent desire for a sterile utopia, “Home Affairs” ultimately endorses a desire for a sterile utopia and mourns its elusiveness in Africa where nothing can cure it of its “diseases.”

Moreover, it seems odd that a futuristic African narrative should rely on the retention of a national identity,Footnote ⁴⁵ but “Home Affairs” remains strikingly invested in its sense of South African exceptionalism.Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet, according to Wald, a conservative nationalistic gesture is the more expected outcome of the outbreak narrative because it “both acknowledges and obscures the interactions and global formations that challenge national belonging in particular.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Born out of increasing fears of globalization—when it became increasingly difficult to control the movement of people—the outbreak narrative marks a yearning for stringent surveillance and the clarity of borders through a demonstration of national threat and fortification.Footnote ⁴⁸ Yet, by extension, Wald’s argument also suggests that the exploration of global or transnational politics could work as an effective counterpoint to the outbreak narrative. As I will now illustrate, Tendai Huchu’s “The Sale” captures the emergence of a global sociopolitical imaginary and, as a result, makes a less ambivalent critique of a sterile utopia.

According to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., science fiction is replete with a “utopian vision of the consolidation of existence into one world.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The rise of the “techno-scientific empire,”Footnote ⁵⁰ he argues, reveals the possibilities of expansive economic and sociopolitical projects that shape and encompass the global reality of mankind. Huchu’s “The Sale” takes its title from the fact that future Zimbabwe is being purchased by China in a piecemeal fashion and is set to lose its last free portion of land in a final sale. Based on current China-Africa engagements, it is not surprising that Huchu imagines China as a “techno-scientific empire” that owns many African countries. Yet it is obvious that Huchu is not intent on representing the utopian prospects of this Chinese “techno-scientific empire”—suggestively called “CorpGov”—and instead demonstrates how this version of utopia cannot serve as a viable African future because it replicates the colonial conditions of Africa’s past.Footnote ⁵¹

In “The Sale,” Mr. Jimmy Munyuki, a black Zimbabwean male, wishes to stay in the city for another day, but he cannot because the Department of Native Affairs, to which he must report, is in his homeland. Despite the fact that the story is set in future Zimbabwe, Huchu references the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act (1963) from South Africa’s apartheid era where African citizens were assigned to ethnically derivative homelands.Footnote ⁵² In effect, this law served to dispossess Africans of their land and controlled and monitored black activity in urban or “white” spaces. Moreover, the narrator states that his particular homeland is now called Mas-ving O because “some of the old names had been kept by CorpGov, with minor phonetic changes to reflect the language of the new administrators.”Footnote ⁵³ It is worth noting that the actual Masvingo was called Fort Victoria until 1982, and in comparison to the previous colonial era, the Chinese appear less interested in making grandiose colonial gestures. Here Huchu highlights the imperial deployment of language; CorpGov ostensibly makes a congenial gesture of cultural merging but rather seeks to infiltrate the local culture through linguistic impositions. This is confirmed when Jimmy confides that these new names are there because “they couldn’t be bothered to learn the old names.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Much like during the colonial era, the native population has lost the right to name the spaces they inhabit.

Now aware of his illegitimate presence in the city, Jimmy is uncomfortable as he walks on the street. He is soon hounded by a drone that commands him “with loud wailing reminiscent of old order police sirens.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Again, Huchu’s descriptive choices seek to stress on a past that is being regurgitated by new technology. The narrator informs us that this is all part of a public health project where the drones monitor and inoculate people on the spot. As a result, life expectancy went up 100 percent as everyone had to comply with the drones. Jimmy has no choice and is probed and injected by the drone but questions, “Were they even human at all with their daily diet of NeustrogenAlpha^TM, and the mood stabilisers and anti-depressants pumped into the water supply?”Footnote ⁵⁶

In the techno-scientific empire, public health is a matter of enforced well-being; no one is given a choice about his or her desired state of health and mortality, and this incident recovers the routine humiliation that African males were often subjected to when confronted by apartheid police.Footnote ⁵⁷ Jimmy also informs the reader that the drone checks testosterone levels in males; unless males are bouncers or in the army, they are monitored to ensure that their testosterone levels remain low. Huchu demonstrates how the black male body is ideologically and biologically engineered either as a monstrous weapon of state power or a predetermined threat that must be eliminated.Footnote ⁵⁸ In essence, he recalls what Arthur F. Saint-Aubin refers to as a “grammar of black masculinity,” which renders the black male body intelligible for white supremacist patriarchy. Stemming from a history of racial scientism, the approach, he argues, was “to fixate science on the black male genitalia and on black male sexual modality . . . as means of compensation (in the psychoanalytic sense) and as a means of social and political control.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Resultantly, “Black men in white society were by their nature criminals and sexual perverts,”Footnote ⁶⁰ which justified the need for the control and surveillance of bodies that were deemed scientifically “grotesque and grotesquely unfamiliar.”Footnote ⁶¹ Under the guise of rationalism, Eurocentric science produces a historical discourse that manages the threat of the African male by insisting on his biological, moral, and spiritual inferiority.

In “The Sale,” Huchu performs a series of reversals within the binary logic of the outbreak narrative, hence showing how the successful implementation of a sterile utopia, in fact, introduces contagion in an African context. The biopolitical state appears to be making a benevolent gesture; reducing testosterone levels means that violence has decreased radically in society. Yet the reality of this biological imposition is that the empire perceives the African male body as a defective one; it is infected by inflated testosterone levels that must be monitored through invasive public health interventions. Moreover, Huchu forces us to confront the consequences of turning African males into “docile robots”Footnote ⁶² and “vegetables, walking zombies”Footnote ⁶³ in science fiction narratives.

In a fascinating monograph on race in American science fiction, Isiah Lavender III opines that science fiction writers often use figures like robots to engage with slavery in ways that are unconscious and racist or, alternatively, used to reflect on a painful racial history that continues to haunt the national psyche. He probes the seemingly deracialized attitude of science fiction as a genre by arguing that it “uses technology or science to distance and defamiliarize the institution and practice of slavery, resulting in constructions of slavery as neo-slave narratives or meta-slavery narratives.”Footnote ⁶⁴ As Lavender argues, the desire for robotic subjects to behave as they are instructed often resembles the colonial reading of African males “as natural machines essential for the cultivation of the physical landscape and capable of producing wealth.”Footnote ⁶⁵ And, in an uncanny fashion, Jimmy watches over a group of workmen, stating that “they were native workmen. Strong men. The sort of men with strong bodies and low IQs that were valued above all else by CorpGov.”Footnote ⁶⁶ It becomes apparent that CorpGov—using biological weapons as opposed to guns—has greater comparative success in relation to the previous colonialists in Africa in producing machines out of the African male.

It is interesting to note that in representing the rise of global empires, Huchu also draws from the well of black historical trauma as described by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic. In his monograph Gilroy posits readings of “diasporic intimacy”Footnote ⁶⁷ as an alternative mode of understanding black history and modernity. Black Atlantic culture is inherently transnational and “continually crisscrossed by the movements of black people—not only as commodities but engaged in various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship—provides a means to re-examine the problems of nationality, location, identity, and historical memory.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Gilroy suggests that just as slaves were transported across the seas, histories of subjection, memory, and cultural heritage reverberate back and forth among various locales. Similarly, through the representation of a global techno-scientific empire, Huchu draws on the collective trauma of South African apartheid and American slavery to remind us how the African male body has always been subjected to mechanic and barbaric representations; a natural machine in the capitalistic colonial project. By extension, “The Sale” explores the universal call for black emancipation from the historical and projected effects of global capitalism. It literalizes the increasing use of soft power as part of the continuing oppression of Africa and its subjects by presenting us with a narrative of biological warfare.

Contrary to what one imagines, the public health policy in “The Sale” creates a euphoric population. Citizens are not unhappy as they inhabit a world that is free from violence and existential strife. As Jimmy himself attests, the drug makes him feel “light and happy for the first time that day. As if his very soul itself was lifted up to heaven. Balance restored in a chaotic world.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The moment of transition is serene and the protagonist loses all consciousness of his prior discontent and political agitation. Yet Jimmy is drugged into oblivion, “knowing full well that within minutes he would be incapable of such thoughts,”Footnote ⁷⁰ and the apparatus of the pharmakon as a “poisoned present”Footnote ⁷¹ is made clear.

In “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Jacques Derrida analyses Plato’s Phaedrus in order to highlight the interconnections among the pharmakon, writing, and death. As stated, “The common translation of pharmakon by remedy [remède]—a beneficent drug—is not, of course, inaccurate,” but this is to gravitate toward “the more reassuring, of its poles.”Footnote ⁷² This translation, he opines, is most common and features strongly in the discourse of rational science and modern medicine. Yet the word pharmakon contains inherent ambivalence, evoking an older tradition of occult magic where the drug can, in fact, be a poison that induces psychosis and death as opposed to healing. In “The Sale” the sterile utopia is entirely dependent on large-scale oppression of the masses who are no longer able to resist or mobilize in order to meet their needs. They have been injected with dreams of a utopia that ultimately contaminates their personal and sociopolitical bodies and the irony of a public “health” policy is made clear.

Toward the end, Jimmy has failed to prevent a further piecemeal sale of Zimbabwe, stating that the drugs were “telling him all was for the best. Yet, deep inside him, a more primeval feeling of rage stirred up,” and in a final act of helplessness and defiance, he “placed his body between the old stone walls and the bulldozers.”Footnote ⁷³ Huchu implies that the right to dissension is a fundamental one, and Jimmy’s suicide can be interpreted as an act of biopolitical defiance that alludes to the sociopolitical necessity of alleged contamination when constructing African utopias. The narrative intimates that there is value in discontent and the excesses of the human body that, despite their ability to lead to various forms of destruction, pain, and suffering, can allow for creativity and personal and political freedom.

Yet, Huchu’s “The Sale” draws its limit at the dissection of a sterile utopia and does not explore the contours of an alternative contaminated utopia. According to Edward James, science fiction has a propensity for “future dystopias . . . in abundance, but few visions of how to dismantle them,”Footnote ⁷⁴ and by way of conclusion, I would like to consider a final short story that assumes the challenge of not only debunking the sterile utopia but also that of situating contamination within the limits of new utopias.

In Nick Wood’s “Azania,” Africa has thrived as a result of its lion economies and the consolidated ideals of the African Union. In comparison to Huchu’s “The Sale,” capitalism and globalization have not led to neo-colonialism and totalitarianism in Africa. The planet Earth, however, has become uninhabitable and pioneer African space missions are currently seeking out new planets to inhabit in different galaxies. The narrative introduces us to life on one of these spaceships through the perceptions of Aneni, the female captain, presumably of Shona descent. They have just landed on Planet XA, which has been nicknamed “Azania,” and it is described as “a veritable waiting Eden”Footnote ⁷⁵ because of its potential to host life. Yet, everyone aboard the ship is suddenly plagued by a mysterious “foreign pathogen,”Footnote ⁷⁶ and they cannot discern whether it has come from Earth or penetrated the ship from Azania. As a result, the central controlling system, nicknamed “She,” places them under quarantine and they are unable to disembark. The narrator’s response is interesting; “more waiting, more cages, quarantine shuts me in, like the ice cage of my dream,”Footnote ⁷⁷ she says, revealing the deferred nature of utopias that inevitably think poorly of the present.

Because utopia is structurally bound to timelessness and deferral, it must, by its very nature, continue to elude and evade us. Additionally, there is often a reactive aspect involved in utopian projections as it imagines itself against, or as resistant to, the present. In the case of the captain in “Azania,” her utopian spirit fosters resentment and impatience with the present that appears as nothing more than a transitory space; a hindrance and not a facilitator of her dream. Consequently, “Azania” attempts to wean the reader off purist notions of utopia but not utopia, per se. The claustrophobic state of waiting on the ship is governed by grave illness and is thus represented as an intolerable and unsustainable way to live. Finally, when the narrator again declares that she is “tired of waiting,”Footnote ⁷⁸ she proceeds to override the central controlling system so that they can finally step onto Planet Azania. She argues with the central controlling system that “we’re humans. We do things. I am tired of cowering from this place,”Footnote ⁷⁹ to which the computer responds, “<We don’t know enough yet about the biological risks.>” Finally, the narrator demands the right to a different utopia; “ ‘perhaps we never will,’ I say. ‘Life is a biological risk. Open the door.’”Footnote ⁸⁰ Placed against an incorruptible machine, the captain must overcome its systematic control in order to realize her contaminated experience of Azania. This narrative does well to highlight how utopian perfection is a form of control that denies any sense of adventure, risk taking, and discovery.Footnote ⁸¹ It is, as the narrator implies, contrary to the fundamental processes of life where contamination and death are necessary hazards that one must assume.

The stance is arguably existential in its expression as it prizes experience as existence. Hence, we find that “utopia is rejected in favour of continued struggle and progress.”Footnote ⁸² The risk that she assumes while stepping out is described as a literal act of contamination; “slowly, the door grinds open and I gasp and cough at the acrid, burning air. . . . My eyes stream under the visor and I cough again.”Footnote ⁸³ She has to exert great force to utter the word Azania,Footnote ⁸⁴ but it produces a “laugh, coughing at the burning, almost peppery air.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The prospect of a compromised body does not interfere with the joy of finally touching base with Azania. We are ultimately unable to decipher happiness from infection as they commingle in a simultaneous expression.

The moment is nevertheless tentative, as Aneni states that “we’re not going to repeat the same shit that happened to us, we’re not going to do a Shell Oil or Cecil Rhodes on this place!”Footnote ⁸⁶ She acknowledges that the settler’s fantasy is a colonizing gesture, and they have to find responsible and ethical ways to “make our heaven”Footnote ⁸⁷ here. Responding to this moment in the story, Lisa Yaszek credits Wood for his complex appropriation of the Eurocentric adventure narrative “by refusing to depict either Azania or the colonists’ responses to it in simplistic, Darwinian terms that characterize the classic first contact story.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Consequently, she argues that “Wood paves the way for a new kind of adventure tale where Africans are free to forge their own destinies in a wide-open future.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Indeed, this narrative affirms the potential for a future that, unlike in Huchu’s narrative, does not necessarily amount to its past and this is due, primarily, to the invitation that this utopia extends to contagion, both in the form of its imperfect past, present, and future.

Standing on this new land, Aneni is able to “note the pain—neither an adversary, nor a friend. Like rain and bananas, mice and joy, it just is.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Making another existential comment about life’s inevitable suffering, she does not find it necessary to inoculate herself from these experiences. Moreover, Wood implies that this approach is a step closer to democratic political processes. When the crew stands together as a hybrid collective, Aneni states that “we can’t afford to lapse too quickly into neat and convenient relationships, however fecund . . . for now, we must stay on our toes and learn new things, new ways of being.”Footnote ⁹¹

It is difficult to not read this as a typical post-transitional South African narrative. For many theorists, the post-transitional state is regarded as post-utopian as it grapples with the disappointment of the naive and overreaching utopianism of post-apartheid South Africa.Footnote ⁹² As a result, many citizens are coming to terms with what Mario Di Paolantonio describes as “a narcissistic national ego”Footnote ⁹³ whose imaginary plenitude always leaves its citizens to deal with its inevitable imperfections. Hence, the reality of post-transitional South Africa is exactly that of “Azania” as the fissures of the “rainbow nation” are made apparent in the microcosm of the spaceship crew. The captain simultaneously iterates the desire for joyful unity, but it is foreshadowed by a grave awareness of difference and the potentially problematic spaces between them. Yet for Wood, this precipice does not incite ennui; stepping outside of the hermeneutic ship enforces the belief in a more tangled and complex democracy that will provide enough breathing room for all in the collective.

From all of the stories discussed, “Azania” is unabashed in its reiteration of utopia and so takes on a surreal quality toward the end. In closing, the captain states that they “move slowly in a clumsy, lurching and stumbling dance—I laugh as Ezi bursts into a song, in words I don’t understand. Finally, I am warm again.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Utopia comes to stand for the imaginative conceptualization of significantly better worlds, not ideal ones. It speaks of a collective that has outgrown the idea of a sterile utopia in order to incorporate both the unknown song and the potential contagion that one can encounter on Planet Azania.

“Azania” encompasses the longue duree of history, capturing the rise of Africa as a global player and the subsequent awareness that this utopia cannot be sustained as the Earth has become inhabitable, leaving open the search for new horizons. Through an illustration of the longue duree, the narrative offers us a blueprint for the structural appreciation of utopia as contaminated by demonstrating how utopia, as a concept, is prone to decay, much like everything else, and must continually forge ahead in acts of constant renewal. It is not invested in a dream of sterile plenitude or stasis but rather that of contaminated and evolving utopias.

As I have illustrated in this article, this response is unique to Wood’s “Azania.” While both Sarah Lotz’s “Home Affairs” and Tendai Huchu’s “The Sale” are successful at limning the outbreak narrative by unsettling the neat borders of sterile utopias, they ultimately elide the engagement with new contaminated utopias. In Lotz’s narrative, the protagonist’s disappointment lies in the unattainability of a sterile utopia in the African context. In Huchu’s case, the sheer possibility of dreaming of a contaminated utopia—while desirable—appears too painful for a continent that will remain forever oppressed. The dream lingers in the text but only ever as an illusory ideal that the author does not pursue.

It is only Wood’s “Azania” that exploits the potential of a Pan-African imaginary to dismantle the ideological anxiety of the outbreak narrative. Arguably, this narrative serves as an exemplary illustration of narratives that “are not just exotic updates to Western technoculture, but necessary to the development of truly global futurity.”Footnote ⁹⁵ For through the embrace of a contaminated utopia African writers mark a resistance to the sterile and generic utopias that come as part of the genre’s inheritance and thereby occupy a unique space as contributors to science fiction at large. As the controversy surrounding the 2015 Hugo Awards indicates, purist notions of science fiction persist, but these authors illustrate that influence is not unidirectional and that African science fiction can indeed contaminate the canon in the most positive of ways.