Since the turn of this century, science fiction, fantasy, and horror have become cornerstones of African literature. This chapter looks at speculative fiction from across the continent that radically reimagines slavery, examining the ways writers have sutured questions of subjection and desired freedom into cyberpunk worlds, revisionist histories, invented mysticisms, and alien encounters. What, this chapter asks, is the function of the sizable body of African speculative fiction that imagines slaveries removed from the middle passage and chattel slavery in the Americas, including works with no clear historical analogue?

Focusing on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, this chapter considers the Child as a conventional figure of futurity – as elucidated by Lee Edelman, Robin Bernstein, Natalia Cecire, Rebecca Evans, and Rebekah Sheldon. What happens to this figure when race becomes explicitly a part of narratives in which children, put into perilous motion by environmental collapse, struggle to find a safe place to grow up? One possible consequence, as Dimaline’s novel illustrates, is the granting to young characters an independent existence from the meanings encoded by the Child. Unlike The Road, which centers the father’s sense of guilt on the son having to find ways to survive in an environmentally destroyed world, The Marrow Thieves centers on young adult characters who struggle to hold together a non-familial community amid an environmental crisis. They think explicitly about how stories can bind them together in the pursuit of common survival even as they can tear individuals apart because of the horrors they recall, and in doing so imagines a future that comes into being in part as a result of the exercise of this agency.