The thought of being invaded has been part of science fiction since at least the 1890s, when H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds (1898). But, with the failure of that invasion (and many of its later imitators), there is no exploration in the Wellsian kind of story of the experience of being colonised. Harmattan Season is a nuanced speculative take on just this experience. That colonisation has been a Bad Thing for the colonised is essential to the weft of the novel (whether it has been bad—or good—for the colonisers is less clear). But it has happened. What comes next? The options seem to be collaboration, compromise, or collapse.
The plot of Harmattan Season is focused on a West African private investigator, Boubacar, attempting to uncover the story of an injured woman who visits him late one night. She is apparently dying, seeking escape from the police. She disappears before those “ofisiden ye” can find her, confusing Boubacar as much as anyone else. The final chapter of the novel is from her perspective, but by the time we get there it feels almost superfluous, as Boubacar’s personal journey has taken him far beyond his initial concerns and into the heart of the colonial experience.
Boubacar's liminal state—caught between his mother's native people and his father's French colonisers—allows him access to both worlds, making him an ideal viewpoint for exploring the whole of the society he lives in. But we aren't simply told about it. Boubacar lives in and knows this world. He speaks to a reader who also understands it, leaving the readers of our own world to interpolate. Onyebuchi’s use of non-English terminology especially engages the meaning-seeking faculties of the reader of fantastika: Boubacar’s first-person narrative is immersive and the reader needs to work out the context, the meaning of terms in both French and the language of the colonised. This is excellent material for a puzzle-solver, whether the reader is trying to untangle the missing person mystery or to work out what exactly the sorodassi might be. And, taking their place as they do within a well-shaped novel, each of these puzzles is needed to understand the other.
Harmattan Season uses language in a variety of other ways, too. When Boubacar is speaking to the reader as narrator he slips through different registers. There is intentional hard-boiled grammar to indicate how tough he is (or, at least, that he wants to present himself this way). But he also presents sophisticated, thoughtful sensibilities, such as when he describes an interaction with an associate. He tells us the policeman “Moussa’s whole job is about looking backward ... it's all about past tense. Figuring out who did what to whom ... he'd say something back about how his job working for the French is all about prevention. Future tense. Stopping the "will do" from happening.” There is a further subtlety, too: What we are reading would not, within the world of the text, actually be written in English. There is the local language (apparently invented) and French. The French terms such as “deux-fois” are as much interruptions in the text as “dugulenw.” And for Anglo readers, the colonial experience might be slightly further distanced because this isn't a British colony.
The Harmattan is the season when the winds blow from the Sahara across West Africa into the Gulf of Guinea. As one character says:
The sand covers the footprints of what came before. The haze blinds us. It kills our crops. It is supposed to remind us of Who controls all, that each of us is singular and so is our relationship to Allah. Then it passes and we are returned to our loved ones. We are returned to the earth ... The français, they are a Harmattan that never ends.
What do you do when the seasons run out of joint? Wish for a past that can’t be regained, live in blame, accept it?
Boubacar can't leave it alone. He pulls away at the threads of his world, regardless of who tells him to let them go—and perhaps some of those are saying so for his benefit, others because they know the most effective way of keeping him on the case is to tell him to stop. Eventually, all this leads him to the figure of the Murutilen, The Rebellious One, and the business of election rigging. The Murutilen wants to bring a Truth and Reconciliation Commission into place, an emptying of the national psyche which would allow all to move forward together. But at the same time, this Rebellious One talks about a “full accounting of the atrocities these people have sought to paper over.” That is a threat to all those who have collaborated, who have accommodated. And who but the truly powerless have not become complicit?
But some of those servants of the regime no longer want to live with their secrets: Boubacar finds that he would rather expiate himself. It seems that what truly turns him is the discovery of Honoré Mirbeau de L’Isle-Adam, a wealthy “brown man” who hides in plain sight, having embedded himself far more completely in French society than Boubacar’s more ambivalent status allows. L’Isle-Adam expects to be able to take his money with him and escape to France, even as he builds his wealth by selling his native land to those escaping the Fatherland. Boubacar can no longer accept a world where those who are, at least precariously, in power hold on to their positions by following terrible orders.
What puts all this within the purview of Strange Horizons? Deep in the hidden heart of the native culture is a clearly fantastic element. There are Floaters, people who can ascend into the air. This is not a magic-realist metaphor; Harmattan Season does not have the structure of magic realism. The idea and effect of the Floaters has serious plot implications: they provide an unexpected rescue and fold back into Boubacar’s further investigation. But they do not burst free from the plot. They do not ask the reader—or the protagonists—to think differently, any more than the discovery that L’Isle-Adam is—spoiler—a bad man. Those deep within the anti-colonial movement undergo operations which enable them to Float after an organ is removed. The girl who gets the story started, it eventually becomes clear, is someone who has undertaken this operation but it is killing her. The organs removed, in turn, can initiate a great explosion, a floating into the air from which there is no immediate descent. Much of the book, though, could have been set in a specific time and place in French West Africa; making it less so helps avoid being caught in the thickets of precise events. Perhaps this combination of factors—or perhaps the author’s status as a writer of science fiction and fantasy—is sufficient to indicate Fantasy. Or perhaps taxonomy is a distraction.
Ultimately, Boubacar gives up on the attempt to hide either side of himself. He engages in a terrorist act, a true act which is the inversion of the false-flag terrorism he realises L’Isle-Adam has been commissioning to achieves restrictions that will affect the election. Boubacar, instead, destroys an unfinished housing development for future pieds-noir—and exposes the mass graves beneath. The bones of the long-massacred float high in the air, with literally no cover-up possible.
The plot has a satisfying end. As readers we are given closure on Boubacar's search and on the larger troubles that it he discovers. But the ongoing story of collaboration, compromise, or collapse doesn't wrap up. Perhaps collapse has been put off somewhat, but the struggle goes on, with no perfect answers.