Womb City

"Womb City is a highly imaginative complexity that spans across themes of human rights, belonging, artificial intelligence, male dominance, surveillance, crime and haunting in a futuristic world that is dystopian to the women who inhabit it, and utopian to its men. There’s much death and life in Womb City , and it reminds us of the quintessential value of womanhood that society can take for granted. It is a magnificent story that’s fast paced and pregnant with so many twists. I like to think of Afrofuturism as imagining a future Africa, wherever that may be, an application of storytelling to interrogate and position the self and identity through story. It was very intentional that I chose Mafinga, a made-up country, in what is a real city in Tanzania. In Mage of Fool s, I wanted to create a realistic dystopian futurism that fed on a largely pessimistic narrative that was technologically- and futuristically-influences. It’s a cautionary story that explores bad leadership, social injustice and climate change to show how bad things can get if we can’t do better. I set out to write a novel with an urgent call to climate action, and with a strong female protagonist in a story of resilience. It imagines a future Africa in worst throes of climate collapse culminating in a desolate world of oppressed people, where only few people benefit from ‘ ujamaa ’—African socialism."