Olivia Kidula writes in the introduction to this book, “If reality had a shape, it would be water—fluid, elusive, capable of slipping through a child’s curious fingers, yet powerful enough to carve out entire landscapes.” In the context of speculative fiction, that shape, that definition—or a lack thereof (or the definition of that lacking itself)—allows the imaginings of different worlds: utopias not plagued by genocide and violence, or dystopias that can reclaim agency, fight back against power, hold the powerful accountable. At its best, in other words, speculative fiction lets us dissolve inherited borders and pour ourselves into the vast ocean of what might yet be.
After all, to imagine futures is to wrestle with the past’s wreckage.
Will This Be a Problem? The Anthology: Issue V, edited by Olivia Kidula and Somto Ihezue, rises from precisely those fluid, shifting shapes of reality. Through sixteen stories crisscrossing through genres, fracturing time and space using multiversal gambits, evoking horror-slick atmospheres, and unleashing demons born of local myth, “the writers in this anthology explore the boundaries of reality—how it bends, how it breaks, and what it can become. They dream fiercely, even amidst catastrophe, offering a version of reality that is not static but alive, dangerous, and filled with possibility” (Kidula again, from the introduction).
The book is the latest product of a thriving speculative fiction ecosystem across the African continent. Over the last decade, African writers have been reclaiming genre spaces, building their own speculative traditions rooted in local myth and anti-colonial politics. Many of these writers consciously draw on Africanfuturism, a term coined by Nnedi Okorafor, a mode of imagining that keeps its gaze rooted in Africa—its cultures and its histories—rather than relying on Western filters.
After all, speculative fiction worldwide has too often been a tired puppet show of Euro-American motifs, the same plots dressed up again and again, leaving little room for rebellion or reinvention. That is what makes works like Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025) or Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) feel so electric, for they disrupt these stale cycles, refuse to sleepwalk through colonial legacies and instead expose how the genre can carry political urgency rather than just escapism. In their wake, they open space for anti-colonial imaginings, in which speculative storytelling belongs to many voices, not just the West’s. They open space to dream on one’s own terms. To dream polychromatically.
Dreaming, in this anthology, is anything but passive. It questions, it fractures, it dares a new order into being. Thus, the hierarchies of power become sites of struggle, laid bare and made new.
Class divide, that ancient scar, is a recurring theme. Kevin Rigathi’s “If Memory Serves” features a corporation which mass-produces a memory-wiping process, profiting by erasing memories but then selling them as luxuries to the rich and the privileged, those who want to experience the joys and hardships of others. The more people wipe, though, the less they remember. And the less they remember, the less they become.
Azara Tswanya’s “The Market of Memories” travels the same road, except that the divisions here are more pronounced, more binding, more blinding. The poor are forced to sell their memories, their associations, and their experiences for crumbs, while the rich gorge on their stories with a collector’s entitlement. Tswanya writes:
When the rich had gathered so much money that nothing could excite them anymore, the prospect of experiencing what others did, especially the poor, became riveting. It gave them a choice without ever truly suffering, like a city boy who visited his village once a year and then boasted about its magnificence to his friends.
These are dystopias, yes, but their shadows belong to a world we already know.
Colonisation and racism are also recurring themes. In “Dinosaurs Once Lived Here,” a story chronicling the many ways the planet Earth might have ended, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu writes, “Empathy only blooms for faces the colour of snow mushrooms, so the world blinks and continues about their day, sipping mimosas at overpriced brunch spots with grass walls.” In “The Clans” by Tonny Ogwa, meanwhile, a priest is “governing” over a group of clans, the white man granting “[t]he Clans and other African clans the rights to be people, albeit to lesser degrees of ‘peopleness.’”
Shingai Kagunda’s “The Language We Have Learned to Carry in Our Skin” reimagines Desmond Tutu’s famous line as something more insidious. “When the missionaries came to Africa,” Tutu reflected, “they had the Bible, and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.” In Kagunda’s world, the colonial project doesn’t end with the land being taken; it continues in the mind. The white man lures the empire’s subjects into backroom deals, offers them a taste of power, and spits down vita—a parasitic creature of war, ukatili, brutality, violence, whichever you want to call it—between the lips of the new national leaders. Once inside, the vita speaks through you, bends your thoughts to its will. The newly minted national leaders, the empire’s chosen successors, find themselves repeating the coloniser’s violence back to their people, their agency already eaten away from within.
In its dystopias, its retellings of folklore, and its nightmare visions, the anthology keeps circling back to one anxiety: If your story has been stolen, what does freedom even mean? If the story of your life is not yours to tell, what kind of freedom is that? And is it freedom at all?
And amidst all the commentary and the sensibilities, the anthology resists categorisation throughout. It refuses to be cramped inside boxes. It never consents to one definition. Peter Nena’s “Why Donkeys Have 44 Teeth,” for example, features creatures with donkey-human-bat traits that are cursed by an ancient witch preying on kids through their dreams; Albert Nkereuwem’s “Commensalism, or the Labyrinth’s Vessels” has a sentient slime trying to understand humanity after having taken it over and Khaya Maseko’s “Acceptance” destroys time itself, removing the present from the past, the many versions of reality colliding, co-existing, co-forming simultaneously. Elsewhere, Andrew Dakalira’s “Ash Baby” imagines the Biblical tale of Job as a never-ending chain of cruelty and endless victims; and “The Sirangoi Fey Market” by Ephraim Orji is located in a bazaar existing on the cusp of the sane and the mystical, the worldly and the otherworldly, as a woman seeks a shaman to execute.
In a world that has so often decided by fiat who among the marginalised lives, dies, has their story told and by whom, this anthology demands a rebalancing, a re-voicing, a retelling on alternative terms. After all, to lose your story is to lose the argument for your own existence. Collecting such a chaotic, genre-defying constellation of stories, the anthology models a form of narrative rebellion. To witness these stories is to remember that other futures are possible, that inherited ideas about order, hierarchy, and belonging can be broken. It is to read differently, to question more harshly.
To witness these stories is to dream without apology.