SOURCE: Booker, M. Keith. “African Literature and the World System: Dystopian Fiction, Collective Experience, and the Postcolonial Condition.” Research in African Literatures 26, no. 4 (winter 1995): 58-75.

In the following essay, Booker presents an overview of contemporary African dystopian fiction, focusing on the African writers's customization of the genre to reflect their native and postcolonial experiences.

Postcolonial writers, actively engaged in the construction of cultural identities for their new societies, often include strong utopian elements in their work. On the other hand, actual experience in the postcolonial world has been anything but utopian. It thus may not be entirely surprising that recent postcolonial literature has taken a powerfully dystopian turn. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced in African fiction, where works containing strong dystopian features have been produced by authors as diverse as Somalia's Nuruddin Farah (“Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship”), Kenya's Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Devil on...