In this Part you will meet three writers who as editors have done much to shape the landscape of African SFF – and provided venues for people to publish.
You can read through the whole chapter by following the “next” links at the end of each interview, or jump to a specific interview by using the links below. You can always return to this chapter index by clicking on the “100 African Writers of SF—Part Nine” link at the top of each interview, and return to the overall project index by clicking on the 100 African category, or clicking
here.
“Why fantasy worked for me was because I left my mom at like five years old to live with my dad in the North. And my mom told me a lot of folk stories, and so in the world of the comic book and the science fiction and the fantasy I could find similar threads. Things that made me feel the same wonder I felt when I heard her stories about the Underworld.”
The story behind each issue, the writers, the artwork, the challenges of publishing in Africa by Africans for Africans.
“I write mostly about queer experiences, queer Nigerians. It’s problematic because before Brittle Paper opened doors, you would send your works to magazines—it didn’t happen to me, but it happened to friends of mine who sent work and were told ‘You have to change any reference to same sex or we will not publish this..."
“For most of the new generation writers, well, at least most of my friends, there are lots of us. Well, five of us. (Laughs.) We are very conscious of the African reader because we are Africans. We live here. We know that kind of books we want to read, the kind of stories we want to be told about us. So we are very intentional about setting words that we use.”
It takes a village to tell a story.
