This essay argues that Africanfuturism is present in a much wider range of African literature than just those texts with science-fictional or speculative themes. Rather, Africanfuturism is a method of storytelling and of literary criticism that centres African ways of being and thinking and, against inherited traditions that render them science-fictional, affirms that they are real. This essay reads Irenosen Okojie’s Butterfly Fish (2015) and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018) as Africanfuturist texts that unsettle inherited categories of the human and of gender. Their sibling kinship sets new terms for the “what is and will be” of the continent’s material, relational, spiritual, and literary futures.
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