Maisha Maene’s short film Mulika (2022) opens with slow-moving shots of a desolate landscape. Filmed on the slopes Mount Nyiragongo, a volcano in the North Kivu province of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and largely captured from above, the earth is etched with the scars of a recent lava flow, including forests of dead trees whose eerie stillness is at odds with the roiling clouds of the steam rising from a still-active crater. The landscape’s muddy tones of gray and black, punctuated by silvery white, are repeated in crosscut interior shots of a spaceship. This ship is operated by a solitary astronaut or, as is quickly clear from the dark skin exposed at his neck and wrists, an Afronaut—to use the popular neologism for persons of African descent in space. Identified in the credits as the titular Mulika (“shine,” “gleam,” or “illuminate” in Kiswahili), the Afronaut’s suit is an iridescent silver, ornamented with circuit boards and a waist light; while his helmet, lit from within, bears a relief pattern of cowrie shells. As he appears onscreen, Mulika addresses the audience in voiceover: “Who am I?” he asks in French.1 “I am a singular being like you. I am a voyager through space-time who seeks to protect the future of humanity.” The stakes of this future come more sharply into focus as Mulika exits the ship. “My spaceship,” he explains, “crashed on earth, inside the mining crater that holds humanity’s treasure.”
The figure of the interstellar voyager, extraterrestrial or otherwise, has a long genealogy in the cultural production of the African diaspora. The resistant cosmic mythologies of Sun Ra and his Arkestra, as captured in the film Space is the Place (1974), and George Clinton’s Mothership, beginning with the album Mothership Connection (1975) and coining the term “Afronaut” in the track “Prelude” from The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein (1976), are two foundational examples. These radical experiments were in turn touchstones for Mark Dery’s articulation of the term “Afrofuturism” in the early 1990s.2 Across the Atlantic, and near-contemporaneously, the British-Ghanaian artist and director John Akomfrah, working with the Black Audio Film Collective, produced the essay-film, The Last Angel of History (1996). It follows a “Data Thief” from 200 years in the future on an adventure through the fragments or traces of twentieth-century Black culture, drawing on many of the same referents as Dery. As a traveler through space and time, and much like Mulika, the Data Thief is an agent of what Kodwo Eshun (also featured in The Last Angel of History) would later call “temporal switchbacks,” a form of proleptic intervention that serves to reorder chronology and thereby enact a critical reevaluation of history in the service of imagining alternate possibilities for the present and future.3
Mulika is very much in conversation with this critical and aesthetic tradition. But, as anticipated by the recasting of the near-lunar landscape as a mining zone in the opening scene—the result of human intervention in the environment—Maene’s film also proffers a significant recoding of the Afronaut. No longer exclusively tied to the possibility of interstellar travel and the technological prowess associated with it, Maene’s Afronaut moves through time in order to bring attention to the realities of extractivism, as the economic model emphasizing the extraction of natural resources for export, and its environmental, political, and human consequences.4 The Afronaut here becomes part of the social ecology of what Macarena Gómez-Barris describes as the “extractive zone,” where life is reduced to the exigencies of resource conversion as part of the longue durée of colonial capitalism.5 It relies, to invoke Katherine McKittrick, on “a linear-temporal-spatial logic of accumulation by dispossession and extraction” in which notions of race and racialization play a central role.6 “Extractive zone” is a particularly apt term for what is now the DRC, as a region that has long been a source for the global market of ivory, rubber, and copper, as well as of human capital in the form of populations transported to the Americas or those forced to work on local plantations and mines. More recently, the DRC has become a major source of minerals including uranium, lithium, coltan, and columbite-tantalite, necessary for the production of batteries, jet engines, and other computer components. North Kivu province is itself the site of the Lueshe mine, which supplies niobium, classified as one of the major “conflict minerals” in the region and an important component of the technologies on which our modern lives depend.7
The contemporary preponderance of products reliant on the extraction of such minerals is on ample view as Mulika descends into the nearby city of Goma. He wanders through streets crowded with cars, mopeds, and other motorized vehicles. An object of fascination, the Afronaut is trailed by curious children, while adults take pictures of him on their mobile phones. These are familiar technologies of the present, and the setting of the Afronaut’s arrival in the world as we know it is underlined by the protective masks that have become characteristic of the COVID-19 pandemic worn by several people in the street. Shot at night, these scenes dramatically expand the visual and aural palette of the film, adding the saturated colors of the streetscape, of clothing, and of artificial illumination, together with the sounds of motors and human movement as well as of Lingala and Swahili (subtitled in both French and English). The Afronaut is at once strange and familiar in this setting. “The robot has come back to Goma,” one onlooker exclaims, where “come back” (revient) suggests the return of something already known. Speaking directly to camera, another onlooker confirms this sense of recognition: “He’s a human like me,” he says. “My man [He’s a real one] (C’est un vrai), he’s cool, very cool. I’m happy to meet him (Je suis content de le rencontrer).” As Mulika traverses Goma, passing through a pulsating nightclub as well as the house of a man (Safari) and woman (Zawadi), he finally comes to the one he is seeking: an ancestor (Tate), who has been awaiting the Afronaut’s arrival.8
Maene’s recoding of the Afronaut in Mulika is not simply a matter of bringing this figure back down to earth and into the present. Such scrambling of space-time is already familiar from the generic registers of speculative and science fiction—particularly of Afrofuturism. The principal shift lies, instead, in the attention paid by the film’s conceit to the relationship between technology and extractivism, because space(-time) travel is itself embedded in the economies of extraction in which the Afronaut aims to intervene. As is revealed in a conversation between the man and woman whose house Mulika passes through, the Afronaut’s suit is made of niobium. “This is a valuable mineral,” the man informs his companion, “highly sought after. It is used to make computers, phones, televisions.” And, he adds: “We have these minerals here, but we don’t benefit from them.” The same is true in Mulika’s time, as the Afronaut explains in voiceover: “Since childhood I have seen the lives of my people destroyed. The bodies of my people buried in the rubble of precious metals destined for new technologies.”
Sent from a future very much like the present, the Afronaut has come to contest—not so much to destroy, perhaps, as to remake—the social economies of extraction on which his existence depends. Maene’s intervention in Mulika, then, brings together two important topics in recent speculative fiction from the African continent. The first has to do with an enduring interest in the figure of the Afronaut, as the embodiment of a technological prowess forestalled on the continent by the terms under which it has been integrated into the global economy. In such narratives, the impossibility of space travel is frequently tied to the failures of the postcolonial state, looking back at once to the utopian promise of the (contemporaneous) eras of the space race and post-independence nation-building and forward to possible futures that might be otherwise than the present.9 The second has to do with attention to the externalities of resource extraction, waste, climate change, and the anticipation of social upheaval in the wake of environmental collapse. The latter set of concerns is exemplified in works such as the Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu’s short film, Pumzi (2009) and the more recent Terra Mater (2023), by the Swiss-Rwandan director Kantarama Gahigiri. Such works often look to an African past—articulated with varying degrees of specificity—to posit imaginative futures-otherwise, although these too are sometimes fraught with the realities of exclusion and erasure that define the present.10 Concerns with technology and utopian futures, Maene’s film asserts, cannot be untangled from present realities of extractivism and its externalities. To think about them together requires not only more clearly grounding the utopian potential of technology in the social and political ecologies of the present, but also a reconfiguration of our understanding of temporal scale—a shift, in short, from the linear progression of human time to the more expansive scales of the environment and the planet.
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The origins of Afrofuturism in the diaspora complicate its relationship to the African continent. Present conditions on the continent and its people appear only fleetingly in much of the work referenced above. This has spurred rejection of the term by, for instance, the South African writer Mohale Mashigo, who describes Afrofuturism as “not for Africans living in Africa,” as well as the Nigerian American Nnedi Okorafor’s formulation of alternate term “Africanfuturism” to describe work “more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology, and point-of-view.”11 However, just as Okorafor recognizes underlying affinities between Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, other critics and writers have sought to trace a more conciliatory map of the connections between Afrofuturism and African speculative fiction. Per Sofia Samatar, many of the source-works of Afrofuturism have their roots in Pan-Africanism; Afrofuturism’s constitutive “planetarity” therefore makes it possible to think of it not as an extension of U.S. cultural imperialism, but as a form of transregional solidarity—even where significant differences and divergences exist.12 A desire in excess of the failed promises of the current order, as Matthew Omelsky has recently argued, spans global Black cultures, producing an “infinite archive” of “infinite articulations.”13 Viewed in this way, to quote Cajetan Iheka, “African projects join their African American counterparts” and together they, “recognize that the future promised by the capitalist present is antithetical to the promise of black life and warrants an alternative.”14 And, indeed, in interviews Maene has explicitly affiliated his work with Afrofuturism, rooting it at once in the material realities of the eastern Congo and the radical critical projects of the broader continent and its diasporas.15
In the last two decades, there has been an explosion of interest in African speculative fiction, whether produced on the continent or in its recent diasporas, across a range of creative media. This includes the work of writers such as the Nigerian Americans Okorafor and Deji Byce Olukotun, the British-Nigerian Tade Thompson, the Ugandan Dilman Dila (also a filmmaker), and the South African Masande Ntshanga, as well as works of visual art such as Kiluanji Kia Henda’s Icarus 13: The First Journey to the Sun (2006; Angola) and Jacque Njeri’s MaaSci (2017; Kenya). The figure of the Afronaut, specifically, appears in the Ghanian director Nuotama Frances Bodomo’s short film Afronauts (2014), the Jamaican-Canadian Camille Turner’s Afronautic Research Lab (2016), and John Akomfrah’s The Airport (2016), as well as in the multi-media interventions of the Kongo Astronauts collective (2013–2024), who are credited as inspiration in Mulika. The Afronaut even features in the Brazilian director Adirley Quierós’s Era uma vez Brasília (2017), which like Mulika opens with the arrival of a voyager from another time, although in this case the Afronaut has traveled forward rather than backward. Across these works, the Afronaut is a figure at once strange and familiar, whose presence (or possibility) facilitates the dynamics of estrangement that are at the heart of the critical potential of speculative and science fiction.16
The figure of the Afronaut also has an historical referent closer at hand in southern Africa: the story of Edward Mukuka Nkoloso and his founding of the Zambian National Academy of Science, Space Research, and Philosophy in the lead up to Zambia’s independence in 1964. Nkoloso’s declared intent was to launch a mission to the moon (or Mars, depending on the account) and thereby to beat both the United States and the USSR in the space race.17 Working on the outskirts of Lusaka, Nkoloso began building a craft and training would-be astronauts. At the center of this group was a teenage girl, Matha Mwamba, who was to be sent on the mission accompanied by two cats. But the project failed to secure funding, Matha became pregnant, and the group disbanded. An object of fascination (to use a generous term) for journalists reporting on the region at the time—as well as of outright derision in A.K. Chesterton’s white supremacist, pro-colonialist screed The New Unhappy Lords (1965)—fragments of Nkoloso’s story would later resurface as an historical curiosity on the Internet, in the form of blog posts, an article for the website of the Atlantic magazine, and a proliferation of YouTube videos and audio documentaries using a wealth of archival footage.18 These fragments of Nkoloso’s story inspired Bodomo’s Afronauts, as well as the Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel’s project The Afronauts (2012) and, eventually, Maene’s Mulika.19
Bodomo’s Afronauts also spurred a deeper investigation of Nkoloso’s story by the Zambian American writer Namwali Serpell, who uncovers in Nkoloso’s apparently misguided ambitions a pointed satire of national and international politics.20 Nkoloso, a former seminary student, schoolteacher, and activist who was member of Kenneth Kaunda’s United National Independence Party (UNIP) as well as a district president of the African National Congress, emerges in Serpell’s account as a political agitator who became increasingly marginalized as the UNIP was institutionalized as Zambia’s ruling party following independence. A fictionalized version of this Nkoloso also appears in Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019), a sweeping, multi-family saga interwoven with the history of colonial and post-independence Zambia. Here, Nkoloso is a mercurial force who draws Matha into his orbit as a young schoolgirl. Interested as much in the real details of Nkoloso’s life as in the ways in which he was misread, The Old Drift presents Nkoloso’s space race aspirations as a form of political performance, one part of a larger revolutionary program that included organizing protests and bomb-making.21 Interest in the disruptive potential of technological utopianism returns toward the end of the novel, where Matha’s grandson, Jacob, develops microdrones (Moskeetoze) that eventually cause the collapse of the Kariba Dam. This apocalyptic event is set against the background of a larger environmental cataclysm referred to simply as “The Change.” At its conclusion, The Old Drift lingers on a speculative future in which alternate forms of social organization—and, indeed, of life—emerge in the wake of large-scale collapse. This narrative turn, following Sarah Nuttall, exceeds the scope of anthropocentric time, shifting attention to the expansive temporal scales of the planet and the universe.22
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The same is true of Maene’s Mulika. As the film progresses, it proves to be less interested in plotting out the reparative potential of retrospective time travel—that is, of offering a vision of what the alternate or utopian future the Afronaut’s arrival in the present might make possible—than in questions of temporal sequence and scale. While Mulika is grounded in the material realities of the present, it begins and, crucially, ends with meditations on the natural world, the temporality of which exceeds linear human time.
The pivotal scene of Mulika is the Afronaut’s encounter with the ancestor, Tate, which immediately follows the expository discussion of niobium. Their meeting is initially a study in contrasts: Tate, wearing a raffia cape and skirt, first appears holding a wooden mask in front of his face and carrying a spear. He begins to tap the spear while Mulika, shown in crosscut, walks down a series of corridors. As the two men come face to face, the warm tones of wood and grass offset the cool silver of the Afronaut’s suit and the blue light of his helmet. Here, Mulika removes the helmet, showing his face for the first time. Tate then hands Mulika a woodcarving (a female figure), saying: “Take this, go, change the world.” As Mulika accepts the gift (and charge), the ancestor adds: “If today is the past of the tomorrow (du futur), we can change tomorrow (on peu changer le futur). If today is the future of yesterday, we are already in the future (Si aujourd’hui c’est le futur du passé, donc on est déjà dans le futur).” Mulika then turns to leave, with the camera following his departure from behind Tate’s shoulder.
Understood as the meeting of past and future in the present, the exchange between the Afronaut and the older man substantiates Mulika’s claim, made in voiceover in the film’s opening scenes, that he is “the wildest dream of my ancestors.” A play on a popular phrase of Black empowerment, Mulika repeats this line toward the close of the film, adding the assertion, “and I will realize their dreams.” In that closing scene, Mulika (now dressed in Tate’s raffia cape and skirt, wearing the Afroanut’s helmet) emerges onto the shore of a lake (Lake Kivu), where he encounters a group of dancers and musicians who receive the Afronaut into their circle. Two dancers then walk Mulika into the lake where, backed by the sound of drums and synthesizer—an aural melding of past and future toward which the score too has been building—Mulika slowly disappears below the water’s surface.23 Reading these scenes in sequence, the Afronaut appears as the embodiment of a wished-for future, the descendant who has come back in time to draw strength from the past and redress the suffering of those in the present.
Yet, several visual and linguistic cues in these scenes suggest that the temporal ordering is not quite so straightforward. Mulika’s encounter with Tate is in fact the point at which Maene’s film deviates from the conventions of linear storytelling. The first indication of that departure comes in the final sentence spoken by the ancestor, which scrambles the distinction between past, present, and future: today is already the future, which means that the future is also today. The transition between Mulika’s exchange with Tate and the scene by the lake further troubles matters. After Mulika exits the room, rather than transition to an external shot at the lake, the camera cuts to a tightly cropped shot of raffia; from here, it pans to the Afronaut’s helmet lying on the ground (in the previous scene, Mulika departed carrying his helmet) and one of the circuit boards from his suit. The camera then moves up and out to show the actor playing Mulika (Sefu Weber-Kal) now dressed in Tate’s cape and skirt, looking directly into the camera. A wide shot then shows Mulika seated in the room where he met Tate, surrounded by a circle of lights, flanked by the helmet on his left and the woodcarving to his right. This cutaway scene suggests that Mulika has melded with Tate, a visualization of his intent (expressed in voiceover) to “ground myself, put down roots, recharge, and draw strength from my ancestors.” But this reading, too, requires a separation between past, present, and future that the film itself does not sustain.
While Mulika repeatedly points to the past as source and resource, the past itself is not imagined as necessarily distinct from the present; there is no idealized outside or moment anterior to the mechanisms of exploitation that Mulika has come to disrupt. When Tate first appears onscreen, he holds a wooden mask different from the woodcarving he later hands to Mulika. In place of eyes, the mask has been fitted with camera lenses. Held before Tate’s face as he awaits the Afronaut, the mask figures as a form of technological mediation that has perhaps allowed Tate to anticipate Mulika’s arrival; visually, it is complementary to the relief pattern of cowrie shells on the Afronaut’s helmet. The transposition of the televisual lens onto the wooden mask—a reference, also, to the camera and therefore to the filmmaker himself—marks Tate (the ancestor) as a figure not exclusively of a pre-technological (or pre-colonial) past. Tate, the mask suggests, exceeds the discrete ordering logic of linear time, inhabiting past and future at once—much like the Afronaut himself.
That condition of containing past and future at once is encapsulated in Mulika the by the Lingala term “lobi,” a temporal adverb that, depending on context, refers either to the past (yesterday) or the future (tomorrow). The word first occurs in Mulika’s voiceover as he walks toward Tate; he muses:
Lobi was once the cradle of humanity, the soil where humankind took root. Today, thanks to the wealth of its soil and subsoil, Lobi has become the object of desire for all the world’s vultures, who have transformed it into hell on earth.
Untranslated in the French, “lobi” here has the quality of a toponym and as such stands for the eastern DRC, if not the region more broadly. (As producer Leo Nelki explained via email, “Lobi” was initially conceived as an earth-like planet on which the film takes place, although this backstory was later cut.) The term next appears in the final line of the film. Here, Mulika’s voiceover shifts from French to Lingala as he declares “I am Lobi” (Naza Lobi), while his helmet sinks below the water’s surface. This line, subtitled in both English and French, is followed by a proximal translation in an additional subtitle that does not correspond to diegetic speech: “I am the past and the future” (Je suis le passé et le futur). In its second usage, the conceptual contours of the term “lobi” have expanded from the spatial (Lobi-as-place) to the temporal and existential. The transposition is pointed, further entangling space and apparently distinct points in time in the figure of the Afronaut: both yesterday and tomorrow, he is at once the site of resource exploitation, the product of the economies of extractivism, and the embodiment of possible futures-otherwise.
Rooted as much in yesterday as is in those possible futures, the Afronaut in Maene’s Mulika slips beyond linear time, understood as the sequential passage from discrete moment to discrete moment, and expresses instead an unbounded time of infinite possibility. The film’s final gesture, then, is not simply toward a better future (a future that is intimated rather than imagined, given the necessarily limited scope of this short film), but to more expansive scales of being-otherwise. This is where Maene’s film—as a work of speculative fiction in the many inflections of the term—aligns most closely with the range of critical projects organized under the broad heading of Afrofuturism. They share, to quote Jayna Brown’s work on Black utopias, a “radical longing.”24 There is at the heart of Mulika a utopian impulse whose fundamentally open teleology (counter calls for the actualization of a clearly-delineated utopian ideal) is an orientation toward the future familiar from other registers of global Black radical thought. It has elements, for instance, of what Omelsky describes as “fugitive time,” a theory of utopia rooted in the desire for or anticipation of an outside to subjection, even as this does not altogether arrive.25 And it is, to return to Brown, a form of “continual becoming, an embrace of change itself.”26 That continual becoming, in turn, is imagined not at the human scale, but in the expansive temporalities of the natural world.
Although the conceit and plot of Mulika align with a teleological conception of liberation rooted in the urgency of addressing present problems, which I have designated under the broad terms extractivism and the extractive zone, in the end the film offers a much broader conception of what freedom might mean. Here, I return to the images that open Mulika: those slow-moving shots of Mount Nyiragongo, in which the volcano is recast as a mining crater. Attention to the natural world returns in the closing scene of the film, as Mulika is submerged below the surface of the lake. In the final shot, the light of the Afronaut’s helmet is extinguished and what remains are blinking electric lights reflected on the water’s surface. In this image, the possible terms of human relation to the natural world have been redrawn. The protagonist has disappeared, in his place the natural world, marked by the realities of human intervention but nevertheless persistent, remains.
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Acknowledgements: Thank you to Maisha Maene and Leo Nelki, who granted me access to Mulika for repeated viewing. I also thank them both for answering my questions about the term “lobi,” including its variable meaning, relationship to the backstory of the plot, and sharing the text of the film’s final line in Lingala.
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Endnotes
- Translations follow those provided in the subtitles of the film, unless otherwise noted.
- In this initial formulation, “Afrofuturism” was presented as a term of convenience, rather than precision; as Dery writes: “Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be called ‘Afrofuturism’” (180). See Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, edited by Mary Dery (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 179–222. For further elaboration of the concept, see the special issue of Social Text on Afrofuturism, edited by Alondra Nelson (20, no. 2 [2002]).
- Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (2003): 299–300.
- For discussion of the concept of extractivism in relation to the Latin American term extractivismo, see Thea Riofrancos, “Extractivism and Extractivismo,” Global South Studies, 11 November 2020. https://globalsouthstudies.as.virginia.edu/key-concepts/extractivism-and-extractivismo. For a discussion of extractivism in specific reference to the African continent, see Charmaine Pereira and Dzodzi Tsikata, “Contextualizing Extractivism in Africa,” Feminist Africa 2, no. 1 (2021): 14–48.
- Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
- Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 72.
- For more information on conflict minerals in the eastern DRC, see: Congressional Research Service (United States), “Conflict Minerals in Central Africa: U.S. and International Responses” (R42618), 20 July 2012, https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R42618.html.
- In the credits, this character is identified as “Tate,” meaning “father” in both Kiswahili and Lingala. In expansive use, the term can also mean “grandfather”—as Maene has described this character in interviews—as well as “ancestor;” see Chelsea Isabella, “Mulika by Maisha Maene” (interview), The Long Take on Short Films, 26 April 2023, https://iamchelseaisabella.com/blog/f/mulika-by-maisha-maene.
- For arguments along these lines, see Armillas-Tiseyra, “Afronauts: On Science Fiction and the Crisis of Possibility,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3, no. 2 (2016): 273-90; Paul Wilson, “The Afronaut and Retrofuturism in Africa,” ASAP/Journal 4. No. 1 (2019): 139-66. See also: Armillas-Tiseyra, “Of Freedom and the Problem of the Future in Contemporary Diasporic African Speculative Fiction,” Journal of the African Literature Association 17, no. 1 (2023): 132–50.
- For analyses of Pumzi along these lines see: Matthew Omelsky, “‘After the End Times’: Postcrisis African Science Fiction,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1, no. 1 (2014), 33–49; Kirk Bryan Sides, “Seed Bags and Storytelling: Modes of Living and Writing after the End in Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi,” Critical Philosophy of Race 7, no. 1 (2019), 107–23; and Cajetan Iheka, African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Durham: Duke Unviersity Press, 2021), 30-39.
- Mohale Mashigo, “’Afrofuturism is Not for Africans Living in Africa’—An Essay by Mohale Mashigo, Excerpted from her New Collection of Short Stories, Intruders,” Johannesburg Review of Books, 1 October 2018, https://johannesburgreviewofbooks.com/2018/10/01/afrofuturism-is-not-for-africans-living-in-africa-an-essay-by-mohale-mashigo-excerpted-from-her-new-collection-of-short-stories-intruders/; Nnedi Okorafor, “Africanfuturism Defined” (2019), in Africanfuturism: An Anthology, edited by Wole Talabi (Brittle Paper, 2020), n.p. https://brittlepaper.com/2020/10/free-download-of-africanfuturism-an-anthology-stories-by-nnedi-okorafor-tl-huchu-dilman-dila-rafeeat-aliyu-tlotlo-tsamaase-mame-bougouma-diene-mazi-nwonwu-and-derek-lubangakene/.
- Sofia Samatar, “Toward a Planetary History of Afrofuturism,” Research in African Literatures 48, no. 4 (2017): 175-91; see also Pamela Phatismo Sunstrum, “Afro-Mythology and African Futurism: The Politics of Imagining and Methodologies for Contemporary Creative Research Practices,” Paradoxa 25 (2013): 113–29.
- Matthew Omelsky, Fugitive Time: Global Aesthetics and the Black Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023), 2 and 27.
- Iheka, 26.
- See Isabella 2023 and [n.a.] “Dernier verre avec Mulika.” 2 February 2023, https://clermont-filmfest.org/mulika/. It is worth noting that Maene sometimes uses the terms “Afrofuturism” and “Africanfuturism” interchangeably; see [n.a.], “Interview with Writer/Director Maisha Maene and Producer Leo Nelki,” We Are Moving Stories, December 2022, http://www.wearemovingstories.com/we-are-moving-stories-films/2019/1/17/mulika. For further discussion of the relationship of Mulika to Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, see Jason Todd, “Yesterday’s Future: Mulika,” Talking Shorts, 10 March 2023, https://talkingshorts.com/yesterdays-future/.
- This is what Raymond Williams once described as the “crisis of exposure” typical of the genre and Walter Mosley summarized as its capacity to simply ask “’What if?’” See Raymond Williams, “Utopia and Science Fiction,” in Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays (New York: Verso, 1980), 209; Walter Mosley, “Black to the Future,” in Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, edited by Sheree R. Thomas (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2000), 407.
- For an editorial penned by Nkoloso describing the goals of the project see: https://www.theglobaltrip.com/images/blogs/tgt2/DSC00988marsprogramV.shtml.
- See Erik R. Trinidad, “Donations to a Country Going to Mars,” The Global Trip, 17 April 2004, https://www.theglobaltrip.com/blogs/entries/donations_to_a_country_going_to_mars; Alexis C. Madrigal, “Old, Weird Tech: The Zambian Space Cult of the 1960s,” The Atlantic, 21 October 2010, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/10/old-weird-tech-the-zambian-space-cult-of-the-1960s/64945/; [n.a.], “Zambia’s Forgotten Space Program,” Lusaka Times, 28 January 2011, https://www.lusakatimes.com/2011/01/28/space-program/.
- See the description of Mulika in promotional materials for Afrikamera 2023 (Berlin), https://www.afrikamera.de/en/filme-2023-en/mulika/. Maene’s film has been paired with Bodomo’s at several film festivals, including the Afrikamera festival in Berlin (November 2023) and SHORTidotes 2.0 in Washington, D.C. (December 2023). At Afrikamera, Mulika also screened alongside Kantarama Gahigiri’s Terra Mater. The film premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in August 2022 and also screened at Sundance in 2023. Maene and producer Leo Nelki are developing a further project related to their work on Mulika, the documentary Spaceman in Kongo, which follows two engineers in their ambition to build a spacecraft. Also inspired by the story of Edward Nkoloso, this project was part of the 2024 Berlinale Talents Program; see: https://www.berlinale-talents.de/bt/project/profile/325852. For further updates on this new film, see: https://www.leonelki.com/spaceman-in-kongo.
- Namwali Serpell, “The Zambian ‘Afronaut’ Who Wanted to Join the Space Race,” The New Yorker, 11 March 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-zambian-afronaut-who-wanted-to-join-the-space-race.
- Serpell, The Old Drift (New York: Hogarth, 2019), 169.
- Sarah Nuttall, “Pluvial Time/Wet Form,” New Literary History 51, no. 2 (2020): 455–72. For more on The Old Drift, see the special issue of Research in African Literatures dedicated to the novel (53, no. 3 [2022]); Rebekah Cumpsty, “Speculative Aetiology in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift: Toward a Decolonial Critique of History and Human,” Gothic Studies, 24, no. 3 (2022): 246–60; and Peter J. Maurits and Thomas Waller, “The Post-2008 African Novel: Generic Discontinuities, Speculative Form, and Post-Capitalist Futurity,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing (forthcoming).
- Much of the film’s score was provided by the Rey Sapienz / The Congo Techno Ensemble, whose song “Eza Makambo” also plays in the club Mulika passes through; for more on the score, see Isabella 2023.
- Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Durham; Duke University Press, 2021), 15–20.
- Omelsky, Fugitive Time, 3 and 16.
- Brown, 113.
Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra