Reflecting in 2012 on animism’s rising prominence in scholarly discourse, Nigerian poet and scholar Harry Garuba raised a key worry about the limits of this discourse: it “consigns the animist worlds upon which they depend to the status of data, objects used only as sources of primary evidence, and the knowledge capital gained is inserted into a linear narrative of the progression of Western knowledge.” Because the academic disciplines interested in animism constructed themselves by othering animist cosmologies, they are not capable of representing these cosmologies. Instead, Garuba argues, animism can only truly be seen through its own logics, logics like the porous boundaries between the physical and spiritual worlds and the nonlinear nature of time. To create animist knowledge instead of just knowledge about animism, we need methods and forms constructed via these logics.
African speculative fiction is an increasingly visible and exciting example of such an animism-grounded way of creating knowledge. The African Speculative Fiction Society (ASFS), which provides a community for African writers and has held an annual competition called the Nommo awards since 2017, highlights the breadth of speculative fiction as a term that is “inclusive rather than exclusive…designed to include most especially any distinctively African forms that may develop.” The ASFS nourishes a tradition dating back to at least the late nineteenth century of African writers using structures like the short story and the novel as vehicles to alchemize animist storytelling traditions into written texts.
Recently, there has been a movement among critics and readers to label works like those recognized by the Nommo awards “africanfuturist,”a term coined by Naijamerican author Nnedi Okorafor to push back against the flattening effect of the more widely recognized term afrofuturism. Mark Dery coined afrofuturism with the American descendants of stolen and enslaved Africans in mind.1 It thus highlights an intersection of Western and African ways of knowing and being. Africanfuturism, by contrast, intentionally decenters and even ignores Western knowledge. As Okorafor puts it, “africanfutursim is specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology, and point-of-view.” Africanfuturist works can thus create animist knowledge as Garbua called for, avoiding the pitfalls of scholarly norms mired in Western ideals.
These novels and stories are slowly gaining more global attention—though importantly, such attention is not necessarily their goal—and with them, animism is also gaining attention as a distinct way of processing the world. An anthology titled Africanfuturism was a finalist for the Locus award in 2021; Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction won that award in 2023. In 2024, Tobi Ogundiran’s short story collection Jackal, Jackal won the British Fantasy Award, and Wole Talib’s novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Okorafor herself has received more global recognition than any other Africanfuturist writer. To give a partial list: a 2011 World Fantasy Award, Nebulla and Hugo awards in 2015, and Locus Awards in both 2018 and 2026. Her success comes in part from her ability to take full advantage of speculative genre readers’ appetite for both recognizable tropes and infinite possibility. Her books often begin within traditional Western genre scripts and then slowly, seamlessly, shift into something radically different, revealing their grounding in animist logics and their ability to create new knowledge on animist terms. This shapeshifting makes the unique affordances of animist cosmology visible to uninitiated readers by showing their differences from Western ways of knowing. A reader of Okorafor can’t help but see how an African-centric future opens up new possibilities for human and more-than-human flourishing.2
No character across her oeuvre demonstrates this revelatory shapeshifting better than the Bone Collector. The Bone Collector appears in two very different novels: Lagoon (2014), a first contact narrative set in Lagos; and Akata Woman (2022), the concluding book of the Nisibidi script trilogy, a YA coming-of-age story about a Nigerian teenager named Sunny discovering her ancestral magic. In both books, the exploitation of Nigeria’s oil-rich wetlands thrums in the background, through casual mentions of its effects on characters’ lives and news reports of spills and fires. The Bone Collector’s scenes bring these tensions to the fore. It embodies itself as a stretch of paved road, creating a petroleum-rich sensory experience and literally consuming human bodies. As a being embodying animist logics, the Bone Collector imagines a fundamentally different way for humans to approach our relationship to oil, a relationship that must be reimagined if humanity is to have any future in Nigeria, or indeed, on earth.
It emerges first in Lagoon, which Okorafor wrote in response to the offensive stereotyping of Nigerians in the critically acclaimed film District 9. Lagoon uses the same science fiction trope as District 9: Aliens land on earth and shake up human affairs. But from the very beginning of Lagoon, animism remodels the script. Before contacting a single human, the aliens liaise with a swordfish, fulfilling her dream of becoming a monster like “some ancestral creature from the deepest ocean caves of old.”3 She can then more effectively continue her quest to force oil pipelines out of her ocean. Humanity loses the centrality they’re used to in alien contact narratives, and the species future of swordfish becomes inseparable from their past. As the aliens continue infiltrating earth, they communicate and collaborate with humans, non-human animals, and spirits alike, acknowledging and embracing the cosmology of the place where they landed.
Within that broad community, which crosses not only species lines but also the supposed border between spiritual and physical planes, the Bone Collector occupies a unique narrative position. Okorafor frequently references well-known deities, like Mama Watti and Chukwa. The Bone Collector is neither one of these deities nor a fictional invention. Instead, it names an intuition shared by many users of the notoriously dangerous Lagos-Benin expressway. A 2013 report by Nigerian journalist Sonala Olumhense on the history and current state of the highway attests: “It is a thirsty road, guzzling the blood of innocent Nigerians. In one accident, a friend of mine was able to find only her brother’s head, but no other part of him.” Portraying this road as a creature that “collects human bones, and the bones of human vehicles” (Lagoon 122) is not fantasy. It demonstrates how an animist worldview responds to changing technologies and new information: not by sectioning them off into discrete boxes, but by recognizing how they weave throughout a porous multi-world system.
Creating models for how animism’s expansive understanding of community responds to encounters with difference and change is one way African speculative fiction helps envision the future differently. Another way is through its ability to make a non-linear view of time tangible. The uplifting of animism within the Western knowledge system built on its othering can take the form of a positive primitivism: To claim “traditional” ways as in some sense superior to “modern” inventions requires that we continue placing them in opposition to modernity. In its opening book, Okorafor’s Nsibidi script trilogy seems to uphold this opposition. As Sunny, who was raised in the United States, gets initiated into both Nigerian life generally and magical practices in particular, she equates Africa with aesthetics and technologies from before colonial incursions and thus distances it from what typically gets called modern. For instance, when she first enters the central city of West African magic users, called leopard people, she notes its architecture: “huts stacked upon huts like hats at a hat shop. Not a European-style building in sight. All this was African.”4
Okorafor then peppers the series with reminders that Leopard people actively avoid oil-based fuel products in favor of juju, an African and non-polluting source of power, even when doing so inconveniences them. Leopard cars “run on some kind of juju” and leopard people travel long distances a “sophisticated sanitary way” instead of getting on “filthy” airplanes.5 And nearly every time Sunny enters a new leopard space, she notices that its dirt paths provide a “natural” and “traditionally African” alternative to Nigeria’s dangerous paved roads. To Sunny, African magic culture is an improvement over the place she was raised, but like the scholarly discourses Garuaba critiques, her articulation of that improvement relies upon the very progress-oriented cosmology she is trying to deconstruct.
As the series proceeds, Sunny gradually sees the error of such thinking and begins to rebuild her worldview through a more circular, simultaneous understanding of time. The Bone Collector helps make those subtle shifts visible and concrete for both Sunny and the reader by embedding the many temporalities of oil’s formation into a single being. Akata Woman follows Sunny and her three friends—Chichi, Orlu, and Shasha—on their mission to restore balance between the human and the more-than-human by returning a stolen ghazel. To do so, they must travel through several entangled worlds, eventually exiting comprehensible space-time to find themselves on The Road, a transit vein that spirit beings use to move between dimensions and times. In its sensorially comprehensible features, The Road resembles a well-maintained contemporary highway with a surface “like fresh concrete. Black, rich, and thick. Like it would last forever.”6 Because Sunny had come to see dirt paths as the natural and African version of transit, she is shocked to find the deepest layer of the spirit realm paved and smelling of oil. The Bone Collector allows her to make sense of it.
A lounge of lizards heralds the Bone Collector’s appearance. When it finishes forming its body out of the flatness of the Road, it resembles a T-Rex: “chunks of road resolved themselves in a thick body on two crouched legs, then a long, wide tail and short arms. The head, the size of two cars, was box-like with hollowed eyes and a wide O for a mouth” (Woman 322). Its exhaust fumes and tar-like texture thus accompany a visual and social kinship to a different moment in oil’s development, when it was animals living and breathing on the surface. Oil forms from the pulverized and transfigured bodies of these ancient beasts. Physically, it is a trace of the past coexisting with the present. Spiritually, it is the new home of the spirits of those beasts. Sunny realizes that “the Bone Collector could never die…The Bone Collector was one of the souls of The Road, an ancestor reborn when the roads had been paved” (Woman 327). It thus allows Sunny and the reader to see that oil and the technologies it facilitates are not the next step in a linear progression from huts and carts to skyscrapers and cars, a step we may embrace or reject. They are instead part of an always ongoing interplay between the spiritual and physical worlds.
Taken as a whole, the series does not imply that so-called modern innovations like asphalt and oil pipelines should be rejected because they are un-African. Instead, it demonstrates how animist logics conduct the risk/benefit analysis around oil differently. They see its full being—animal and spirit, ancient and future—as a constant unit. The Bone Collector is viscerally contemporary, an overwhelming manifestation of what oil-based economies do to human bodies, especially human bodies in close proximity to oil’s extraction and refinement. When it eats people stuck on infrastructure allowed to crumble by a corrupt government, it may seem to highlight the harms of a modernity imposed from outside and perhaps even to express a longing for a return to different way of being. Yet those who witness the Bone Collector immediately understand it to be of its place, a spirit slipping into the physical plane. It is thus a reminder to the reader that oil, like every other entangled piece of the universe, has always already been here.
As an aesthetic form created through animist logics, African speculative fiction allows African readers and writers to explore the futures this cosmology makes possible, futures that promote the flourishing of all beings, human and more-than-human, and that push against Western progress narratives by acknowledging time’s circularity. Works like Okorafor’s that use animist logics to shapeshift the norms of globally recognizable speculative fiction genres can also help wider audiences understand how a future built on animist logics would be different. This shapeshifting conjures the possibilities of collaborations that truly decenter Western ways of knowing.
In Plastic Matter, Heather Davis argues for a radical reimagining of our relationship to oil and its byproducts through finding kinship with the unique microorganisms being birthed on our plastic waste. This kinship would “offer ways of living that are more implicated, enmeshed, and earthly, working against some of the universalizing logics that helped create plastic in the first place.”7 Through the Bone Collector, Okorafor makes a similar argument but with two key differences. First, because her work emerges from Nigeria, it centers those who intimately encounter oil itself via floods, fumes, and fires that threaten their way of life, rather than those for whom plastic is the most intimate format in which they physically interact with oil. Second, because it is built upon animist logics, it sees beyond the physical world and includes spirits, ancestral and otherwise, in the conversation. Acknowledging animist knowledge as equal to western rationalism means taking scholarly work and speculative fiction as equal means of knowledge production. By doing so, we can imagine a less human-centric way of approaching oil and, more broadly, a global future of greater flourishing for all the beings who occupy and cross into our world.
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Endnotes
- Mark Dery, “Black To The Future: Interviews With Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, And Tricia Rose,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, edited by Mark Dery (Duke University Press, 1994).
- Many scholars have noted resonances between Okorafor’s novels and Garuba’s theorizations of animism. See, for instance, Kirk B. Sides, Environmental Entanglements: African Literature’s Ecological Imaginary (Oxford University Press, 2025); Jay Rajiva, Toward an Animist Reading of Postcolonial Trauma Literature (Routledge, 2021); Alice Curry,“Traitourousness, Invisibility, and Animism: An Ecocritical Reading of Nnedi Okorafor’s West African Novels for Children,” International Research in Children’s Literature 7, no. 1 (2014), 37–47.
- Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon (Saga Press, 2014), 6. Future references cited in text.
- Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch, (Penguin Random House, 2011), 70.
- Okorafor, Witch, 299; Nnedi Okorafor,Akata Warrior (Penguin Random House, 2017), 249.
- Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Woman (Penguin Random House, 2022), 315. Future references cited in text.
- Heather Davis, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022), 6.
Theo Joy Campbell