Dilman Dila's A KILLING IN THE SUN

Once again I am reminded how big a mistake it is ever to snooze on African speculative fiction; Ugandan writer/filmmaker/activist Dilman Dila has a whole sky full of fresh air to blow through the genre, and I'm annoyed as heck that I only heard of him via a Story Graph challenge some eight years after his collection A Killing in the Sun was published.

But, better late than never.

From the very first story, "The Leaf Man" we see that his imagination is both powerful and on point. "The Leaf Man" is a traditional healer and occasional shaman who has been helping his country deal with the malaria problem for his whole career, traveling from village to village on his government-issued bicycle with a passel of herbs and wisdom. Until one day, a foreign corporation talks its way into using his home village as a test locus for their latest Big Science solution to the malaria problem, which not only proves to be worse than the original problem but to get worse with every attempt to solve the new problem. Meanwhile, our Leaf Man has figured out how to keep himself and one starving foundling child safe, only to become a hunted figure. This story alone is a must-read for everybody who thinks CRISPR is going to be the answer to everybody's prayers and monkey's paw? What's that?

Several of the other stories in the collection share a universe in which most, perhaps all, of the African continent has come under the dominion of a very powerful being with either supernatural powers or access to otherwise unknown advanced technology, who has set himself up as the Emperor of Africa and created an Orwellian nightmare in the name of freeing/decolonizing the continent's peoples. All white people (and possibly Arabs, too?) have either been expelled or secretly enslaved; the remaining population all live in giant "pyramids" with thousands of other families and are strictly monitored for conformity to the Emperor's idea of what constitutes truly African culture; but hey, there are personal ornithopters and it seems to be a post-scarcity economy. BUT, among the things that are considered colonial/not-African culture are non-procreative sex and any kind of female empowerment or emancipation, and a standardized skin tone is enforced on everybody by means of a chemical that is both a dye that can be rubbed into non-conforming skin or a drug that pregnant women are required to ingest to make sure that their babies are born dark enough.

Of these stories, the most impactful for me was "A Wife and A Slave" which concerns a man, Kopet, who once upon a time had plans to emigrate with his fiancee to Sweden but just as they were leaving the new African Empire was declared and they elected to stay home -- to his tremendous regret, as not long after their wedding his now-wife, Akello, has taken all of the new emperor's strictures to heart, especially the one about non-procreative sex and how the husband must not have to dress or even wash himself, not even his hands after a meal (which he must eat with his fingers, cutlery being a shameful colonial artifact). The bright and engaged and independent woman he fell in love with, and had enjoyed a healthy sex life with before Empire, is now fully engulfed by her role as Good Wife. The story concerns a series of near-misadventures and an encounter with an escaped white woman who was born into slavery but has dared to try to escape it, on the way to finding out if his marriage is doomed forever. No, your eyes are leaking.

Other stories, such as "The Healer" concern the eternal conflict between Western-style religious beliefs and traditional folk medicine and what happens when one tribe adopts the former and all but exterminates another who still practices the latter (which, because this is speculative fiction, actually works to the extent that it is basically magic, as is also the case in "The Leaf Man). Then there's "Itanda Bridge" in which the military forces a young man, Obil, to dive for evidence from a car crash at the bottom of a river, only for Obil to discover an amazing Lovecraftian secret just a bit downstream from where the wreckage isn't. The title story, "A Killing in the Sun" threatens to feel like a rehash of Jorge Luis Borges' "The Secret Miracle" right up until it totally doesn't because there are Witches Involved. Every story has a recognizable speculative fiction touchstone but does something unique and unexpected with it, usually in such a way as to tug at the reader's conscience and her heartstrings as Dila explores friendship, romance, the love of a father for his children, and the question of how much of a person's loyalty a regime has the right to claim -- except for one story near the end, which comes completely out of left field and turns the bizarre up to 11.

"The Yellow People" could be viewed as just another clever twist on a zombie story, but it could also be viewed as a very clever twist on a serial killer story! It's told from the killer's point of view -- he's a white man who moved to Uganda to better practice his grisly hobby with less chance of being caught or punished --  and that killer racks up a truly epic body count before something weird starts happening with the bodies he has stashed away on his property. I found "A Wife and A Slave" more emotionally satisfying but "The Yellow People" is quite possibly the best and most intriguing story in the bunch - and, no, by the way, there isn't a dud among them. You might wind up liking the collection's final entry, "A Bloodline of Blades" and its struggle between a tradition of assassination and a competing one of music to be better than "The Yellow People"; you might also prefer the creepy delights of "Okello's Honeymoon" as it tells us the story of a young man's near destruction by supernatural forces on his wedding night. Point is, there's something for everybody who loves speculative fiction.

Dilman Dila is definitely going on my "OMG must read everything he does" list. And as I mentioned above, Dila is also a filmmaker. I wanted to embed one of his shorts here, but YouTube won't let me because there's adult content. Do yourself a favor, though, and go check out his YouTube channel. His films are narratively compelling and universally appealing, full of suspense and just enough WTFery to keep the viewer riveted. I especially recommend his very recent Kifaro, which could easily fit in as an entry in A Killing in the Sun as it explores the intriguing relationship between binary computer code and African divination systems through the time-honored story of a man who catches his cheating wife. Give this man a proper film deal already! I want to see what he can do with a feature length.

Or a novel, for that matter.