Sub-Saharan Africa comprises almost 50 nations in West, East, Central and Southern Africa. As Ashleigh Harris (2019)has described, the literary landscape of Africa is extremely complex, featuring a multiplicity of languages, both indigenous and European. It is also a landscape that contains authors who often eschew (or are forced to eschew) the conventional publishing industry to circulate their work via fanzines, electronic blogs or other outlets. It must also be observed that much of what can be termed sub-Saharan crisis fiction has not been published in the region, or even for readers belonging to it. Indeed, much of this fiction is produced by diasporic authors, located in relation to at least two different cultures and cosmologies. In addition to this, Sub-Saharan literature contains a number of works that very clearly describe worlds similar to those evoked by North American or Nordic cli-fi, but that are set in the past or the present. Such texts, including Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were, have been added to the corpus since they demonstrate how what North American and Nordic cli-fi imagines as dark futures has long been a reality in certain parts of the world. Several of the texts listed below are also speculative in other ways than the Nordic or North American texts. They thus draw on a variety of sub-saharan cosmologies and also employ a type of future-thinking referred to as Afrofuturism or Africanfuturism (Okorafor) that recognizes, but also tries to move beyond, the extractive histories lived in much of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Novels
Beukes, Lauren. Zoo City (2010)
Habila, Helon. Oil on Water (2010)
Mackay, Alistar. It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way (2022)
Meeran, Zinaid. Tanuki Ichiban (2012)
Meyer, Deon. Fever (2016)
Okorafor, Nnedi. Who Fears Death (2010)
Okorafor, Nnedi. Lagoon (2014)
Okorafor, Nnedi. The Book of Phoenix (2015)
Okungbowa, Suyi Davies. Lost Ark Dreaming (2024)
Obioma, Chigozie. The Fishermen (2015)
Onyebuchi, Tochi. War Girls (2019)
Rose-Innes, Henrietta. Green Lion (2016)
Serpell, Namwali. The Old Drift (2019)
Thomson, Tade. Rosewater (2018)
Thomson, Tade. The Rosewater Insurrection (2019)
Thomson, Tade. The Rosewater Redemption (2019)
Tsamaase, Tloto. The Silence of the Wilting Skin (2021)
Tsamaase, Tloto. Womb City (2025)
Arigbabu, Ayodele. Lagos 2060 – short stories (2013)
Films
Atlantique (2019)
Hello, Rain (2018)
Pumzi (2010)