Back From the Future

Hey, Sheriff here 👋 

Two weeks ago, I made the argument that originality is dying in African tech.

Today, I have another idea on how to get back some of that originality.

I’ll start by asking you a different question.

What if the key ingredient that’s missing in African tech isn't capital or talent?

What if it's imagination?

In today's edition, we'll trace the surprising link between science fiction and real-world innovation.

Because for every piece of tech has transformed the real world…

Someone imagined it first

In 1992, a novelist named Neal Stephenson wrote about a place called the Metaverse.

It was a virtual world where people walked around as avatars, bought digital real estate, and built entire economies out of code.

That novel was called Snow Crash.

Thirty years later, Facebook renamed itself Meta. 

The word "avatar," as we use it in tech today, comes from that book. 

And Google Earth's co-founder John Hanke has said the book's fictional "Earth" app was the direct inspiration for what became Google Earth.

One novel. Three of the biggest tech products of the 21st century.

But Stephenson isn't a one-off. We can go back even further.

In 1945, a writer named Arthur C. Clarke published an essay in a British magazine called Wireless World, describing how satellites placed in orbit could beam communications across the entire planet.

The first commercial satellite didn't launch until 1965, exactly 20 years later.

Today, that orbit is officially called the Clarke Orbit.

And then there's Elon Musk.

In 2018, he tweeted that Isaac Asimov, the renowned physicist and novelist's Foundation series was "fundamental to the creation of SpaceX."

That same year, when SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launched a Tesla Roadster into orbit, it carried Asimov's Foundation trilogy encoded on a quartz crystal designed to survive millions of years in space.

Someone imagined a world. Someone else built it.

That's the pattern.

But be careful with the evidence

Now, it's tempting to draw a clean line from every sci-fi book to every startup.

But it’s rarely that clean.

Take the popular story that Star Trek's communicator inspired the mobile phone.

Martin Cooper, the Motorola engineer who invented the mobile phone, gave a different account.

In his memoir Cutting the Cord, he says Motorola had been working on cellular tech since the late 1950s, well before Star Trek hit TV in 1966.

The real inspiration? 

Dick Tracy's two-way wrist radio, from a 1930s comic strip Cooper read as a kid.

The Star Trek myth? 

It came from a 2005 mockumentary called How William Shatner Changed the World. Cooper says he got caught up in it and didn't correct the record.

Fiction does leave an imprint. But we should be precise about which fiction and how.

But even after we separate what’s factual from what’s not, we still need to ask…

Why does fiction work so well?

The short answer: it can break through constraints.

Here's the thing about engineers: they work within constraints.

Existing materials. Budgets. Physics. Timelines.

Fiction writers don't.

When Stephenson described a zoomable, manipulable 3D globe of the Earth in 1992, he wasn't limited by server costs or satellite imagery resolution.

He just described what would be useful.

Engineers spent a decade closing the gap.

This is why companies like Magic Leap hired Stephenson as their "Chief Futurist."

Fiction is R&D without a lab.

It lets you test ideas before you test prototypes, and it generates the conviction that the thing is worth building at all.

And when you think about it, the founders who’ve built transformative products in the real world are often steeped in fiction at some point in their lives.

The pattern holds.

Musk has cited Asimov repeatedly and publicly. 

Google's co-founder Sergey Brin called Snow Crash one of his favourite novels. Jeff Bezos revered Stephenson enough to bring him into Blue Origin.

SpaceX's autonomous drone ships, Just Read the Instructions, and Of Course I Still Love You, are named after ships from Iain M. Banks's Culture series.

The fiction shaped what the founders thought was worth building. And the names are simply a public tribute.

Who’s sparking imagination for Africa?

Something important is quietly happening in African speculative fiction.

And it deserves more attention from the people building Africa's tech ecosystem.

Nnedi Okorafor, a Nigerian-American novelist, coined the term "Africanfuturism" in 2018. 

It's science fiction rooted directly in African culture, history, and mythology, and it doesn't centre the West.

Her novella Binti, about a gifted Himba girl from Namibia who goes into space while carrying her culture with her, won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella in 2016.

Those are the two highest honours in science fiction.

Tade Thompson, a British writer of Yoruba descent who grew up in Nigeria, won the 2019 Arthur C. Clarke Award for The Rosewater Trilogy, set in a future Nigeria where an alien biodome transforms society.

He was only the second writer of Black African heritage to win the prize.

Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu's short film Pumzi (2009) imagines a future East Africa 35 years after a catastrophic water war. 

It screened at Sundance and won Best Short Film at the Cannes Independent Film Festival.

And in 2020, Wole Talabi's Africanfuturism: An Anthology gathered short stories from across the continent into what's been called a landmark collection for the genre.

Even my Tech Safari editor, Timi, has written Cloudgazer, a story selected for the 2023 World’s Best Science Fiction, by Bloomsbury

These are not marginal voices. They're winning the field's most competitive prizes.

The question is: are the builders in Africa paying attention to them?

Here's the problem. African fiction and African tech are not in dialogue.

Okorafor, Thompson, Kahiu, and Talabi are imagining what Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, and Kigali might look like in 30 or 50 years.

But the founders building Africa's tech ecosystem are mostly building with Western mental models.

The futures being pitched for Africa, in decks, keynotes, and memos, are often scaled-down copies of futures already built elsewhere.

A Stripe for Africa. An Uber for Africa. A Shopify for Africa.

These things fit. But it's hard to build something original if the picture in your head was drawn somewhere else.

It’s also worth asking…

What could a uniquely African imagination unlock?

The pictures in your head constrain what you're able to build.

A founder building drone logistics who has read Okorafor might design around communal trust networks and oral culture, not just route optimisation.

A founder building identity infrastructure who has read Thompson might think very differently about what it means for a government to control a body.

And they might build safeguards that a Western product framework would never surface.

A fintech founder who has sat with Talabi's stories might see informal economies not as problems to formalise, but as systems to amplify.

The imagination shapes the product.

One could argue that this is what Silicon Valley subconsciously understood, not because its founders were more talented, but because they were swimming in a rich imaginative tradition that permitted them to think beyond the incremental.

Stephenson gave them the metaverse. Asimov gave them a reason to go to Mars. Clarke gave them satellites.

African tech needs its own reservoir of possibilities. But most African science fiction is still in short story and novella form.

So that reservoir isn’t big enough yet.

That's partly due to economics.

The publishing infrastructure on the continent is thinner than it should be, and the market for full-length sci-fi novels is still developing.

In 2024, Disney and a Lagos-based studio, Kugali, produced Iwájú, an animated sci-fi film with an Africanfuturist narrative. 

It was the first major Western platform to bet on African Sci-fi.  But one show is only a start.

The continent needs novelists imagining future Kigali, future Accra, future Nairobi at the scale of a Foundation or a Snow Crash.

They need to dream up new forms that the resources, landscapes and social structures in Africa could take in the future.

And Africa’s tech community needs to pay attention.

Until it does, our builders will keep reaching for blueprints designed for someone else's world.

So, if you’re an African builder looking for where to start, pick up Binti. Pick up Rosewater. Watch Pumzi. Read the Africanfuturism anthology.

Let the pictures in your head get redrawn.

And if you already see the link between fiction and real-world progress, tell me: what works of fiction have shaped your thinking? 

Let me know here.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on This Week in African Tech.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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