Okorafor has won a number of awards in the field of speculative fiction, including the Hugo and Nebula, for her work that she has labeled Africanfuturism.
This novella is set in Ghana and centers around a young girl whose life was changed when she was only five by an apparent meteor shower. As she watched from her perch in one of her family’s shea trees, one of the objects from space came down and hit the dirt at the base of the tree. She grabbed it and held it, and she was never the same. By the age of seven, she had turned into someone else entirely. Having forgotten her given name, she was now known as Sankofa and “Death’s adopted daughter.” Sankofa emitted a green glow and all living things around her – except for her companion fox – fell dead. Technological devices – even cars – could also die in her presence.
She learned to control the light so that she didn’t kill indiscriminately, and also learned to harness her reputation to get the food, clothes, shelter, and shea butter she occasionally needed. (The green light made Sankofa’s skin dry out. Shea butter, used in lotions, was the only thing that helped, perhaps because of the circumstances under which she first encountered the object from space.)
This all plays out as we follow Sankofa on her quest to find out what happened to her and if there were a way to change it, so that she actually could belong somewhere and live “normally.” Although seemingly old beyond her years, she was only 14 by the end of this story, and she could not help but long for human companionship, friendship, and family. She also wanted to find out what the involvement was of an international corporation named LifeGen – the name that keeps coming up in her travels. Is it somehow connected and if so, what did that mean she could do?
Discussion: This story is set in the near future – the author references the pandemic of 2020 as a background issue. Society is more advanced now – there is new technology, including artificial intelligence drones and robots that perform some societal functions. In fact, because of Sankofa’s effect on them, one of the epithets she was called was “Evil Remote Control.” Traditional culture in Ghana is mixed in with advanced technology, allowing for superstition, tradition, and storytelling to affect Sankofa’s reception in the villages through which she passed in the startling but common juxtaposition of old and new in today’s global economy.
Evaluation: I was captivated throughout this short book, and wanted to continue the story. Okorafor is quite the storyteller, and her visions are creative and interesting. This is an author I definitely want to read again.
Rating: 4/5
Published by Tordotcom, a division of Macmillan Publishng, 2020
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Aw, yay! Nnedi Okorafor’s books have been a little hit or miss for me, but this was very definitely one of the hits. I loved the world she’d created.
I gave a presentation on novels by Octavia Butler this spring and it got put into the category of “afrofuturism,” which was a term I had to look up. It doesn’t sound like “Africanfuturism” is anything different.