The new golden age: decoloniality and African futures in South African and Nigerian speculative fiction

Abstract

This thesis examines South African and Nigerian speculative fiction as a decolonial mode of world-making through which alternative futures, memories, and epistemologies are articulated within conditions of planetary entanglement. Engaging questions of climate collapse, racial capitalism, and epistemic violence, it argues that African speculative texts imagine futurity as a relational, plural process grounded in indigenous knowledge systems, spiritual ecologies, and non-linear temporalities. Drawing on decolonial theory and Afrofuturism, the study reframes speculative fiction’s “Golden Age” beyond Western technocratic narratives, demonstrating how African texts intervene in global imaginaries of progress, crisis, and survival. Through comparative textual analysis of selected South African and Nigerian works addressing themes of addressing themes of space, environmental precarity, water, human transformation, and magical realism, the thesis shows how African speculative fiction reclaims the future as a site of ethical relation, ecological responsibility, and ongoing becoming.