Back to ‘the Future-Sign Tree’: A Comparative Reading of Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Kindred by Octavia Butler

Amos Tutuola’s work has been characterized as African speculative fiction, and his novella, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), combines technoculture, spatial travel between worlds and African indigenous knowledge and folklore. These elements arguably position it within Africanfuturism or even Africanjujuism, as defined by Nnedi Okorafor. While its African setting and focus on indigeneity align with Africanfuturism, the novella’s engagement with themes of enslavement also invites comparison with Afrofuturism, which is typically associated with the African diaspora and often foregrounds narratives of enslavement. Moreover, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts suggests, from an Africancentric perspective, that enslavement is implicated in modernity. We seek to show how Tutuola’s novel destabilises the distinction between Africanfuturism and Afrofuturism through its focus on enslavement. To this end we place the novella into conversation with Octavia E. Butler’s classic work of Afrofuturism, Kindred (1979), as both texts explore histories of enslavement through tropes of speculative fiction, fantasy and interactions between parallel worlds. Through its focus on enslavement, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts unsettles the binary between the African indigenous focus of Africanfuturism and the experiences of enslavement often explored in Afrofuturism.