What It’s Like To … Build Space for African Speculative Fiction from Nairobi

Speculative fiction — an umbrella term for horror, fantasy, science fiction, and their many subgenres — has long offered writers a way to imagine beyond strict limits. For Olivia Kidula, the editor-in-chief of Will This Be A Problem?, that possibility has always mattered, especially in African literary spaces.

Founded in 2014, Will This Be A Problem? (WTBAP) has spent years publishing African speculative writing in anthologies with little recognition and few resources. That changed in 2024, when Kidula and her co-founder expanded the project, launched Shilitza Publishing Group, and made WTBAP one of its imprints. The fifth anthology in 2024, featuring writers from seven African countries, marked a turning point: it was the first time the writers were paid.

“For me, speculative fiction has always been about freedom,” Kidula tells OkayAfrica. That idea runs through her account of building WTBAP. In Kidula’s hands, speculative fiction becomes a way of pushing back against narrow ideas of who gets to be weird, expansive, futuristic, or fully seen.

Since then, WTBAP has begun reaching spaces that once felt far away, earning international reviews and picking up major recognition, including selection for the 2026 Bram Stoker Award longlist, which recognizes notable achievements in horror and dark fantasy, and nominations tied to its online magazine. But the deeper story here is about what it takes to build literary infrastructure before the world agrees it matters.

Kidula speaks to OkayAfrica about discovering African speculative fiction as a reader, building WTBAP into a home for writers across the continent, the ethics of paying creatives in an exploitative industry, and why speculative fiction offers African writers room to be stranger, freer, and more expansive on the page. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Olivia Kidula: As a child, I read a lot. My folks were very intentional about getting me African books because I also read a lot of Western books. My dad was like, “No, we need to find some balance.” So my parents were very encouraging. We had a huge library at home. Whatever you wanted to read, you just read.

I have a vivid memory of my dad taking me to a thrift bookshop, where I bought the first book in the Animorphs science fiction series. It was a secondhand copy. I was so excited. For me, speculative fiction has always been about freedom. Growing up, the more ‘mature’ African books I read became very realistic. When there was fantasy, it was usually a punishment story, like a girl goes into the forest and she’s taken by an ogre. Very strange morality lessons. Western fantasy and science fiction felt so much more open. You could just be weird and expansive without always being taught a lesson.

Later on, that interest grew because there was so much Western fantasy and speculative fiction around me. That’s when I discovered [award-winning Nigerian-American science fiction author] Nnedi Okorafor and read Lagoon. My mind was blown. I was like, “Yes, I can see Lagos. I can see Africa.” Reading her work — and meeting other people who read her work — opened up a whole world for me. I was introduced to more books. I realized there was much more of this genre; I just didn’t have access to it. That was my opening. I remember thinking, “Why can’t we do this? Where are our stories?” 

A lot of SFF is racist. There is a lot of whiteness. They want whiteness in speculative fiction as if white people are the only ones who should be in space, for example. We can write against that. That’s what speculative fiction makes possible for those of us in the margins.

Before Will This Be A Problem? (WTBAP), I was learning through magazine work. Back then, I was more used to editing nonfiction. Following one of the early anthologies, I saw a review that asked, “Where was the editor on this story?” I remember how much work I had put into it. The comment made me realize how much I still had to learn. Editing fiction was different. In nonfiction, you can cut something, add your own sentence, move things around… Fiction taught me a different kind of care.

Personally, my favorite genre is horror. Even the first story I put into our first anthology was this weird horror piece about a fallen angel. I like stories that feel like you’re seeing just a fragment of a much bigger world. Somebody once said some of the stories in WTBAP feel like they’re parts of a larger narrative. That’s exactly my editorial style. I want that sense that the world continues before and after the page.

I met my co-founder, Kevin Rigathi, after reading a story he submitted to the Storymoja competition. It was a fantasy set in Kenya. I wanted to know who he was, so I reached out on social media: “Hello, I love your story.” We started talking. I told him I was an editor, he was a writer, and we agreed to do something together.

So the first anthology of WTBAP came together by just us calling our friends. We’d ask: “Hello, I remember from high school, and you used to write poetry. Can you write a poem that’s a bit fantastic?” By the third anthology, we got serious. We needed art, a proper cover, and more time to edit the stories. 

Even before we started the anthologies, we had gone to [the Nigerian-based speculative fiction magazine] Omenana first and read everything they had done. To us, Omenana was like our father. So getting a review there — from [Nigerian science fiction writer] Wole Talabi, whose work I had already read many times — meant a lot. The review pointed out what wasn’t working, but it was still encouraging. It felt like people were finally seeing what we were trying to do. We knew we needed to step up.

By the fourth anthology, it felt like we had done everything we were told to do and were just waiting for the applause. It didn’t come. That was a hard moment for me. I almost left WTBAP because it felt like it wasn’t working out. Other publications had come up and were landing big names, and we still weren’t paying writers.

Then the pandemic happened, and I left Nairobi to stay with my mother on her farm. And there was also a break for WTBAP. I knew that if we were not paying writers very soon, it would become a very dangerous slope. People need to be applauded for their work and for their contributions. People need to eat. I had seen too many horrible things in the writing industry. It’s a very exploitative market, and there’s no accountability for exploitation.

I was cheated very badly as a young, up-and-coming editor, and I’ve seen how that callousness in the industry makes people meaner and more selfish. I don’t want people to go through what I went through. As long as I’m in charge of something, nobody is going to go through what I went through. I was managing my mother’s farm, and I asked her to give me some acres of maize so we could pay our writers. She agreed.

When the fifth anthology came around, we announced we were paying for submissions, and it was the highest pay in Africa that year. And the quality of submissions was insane. Writers I had dreamed of working with were suddenly submitting to us. Seeing people read our stuff made me sit up a bit straighter. 

For a long time, WTBAP was in that awkward space where it was more than a blog, but not yet a “real” press. People would call us “just a website.” I knew we needed to become a publishing house, and soon Shilitza Publishing Group was born. WTBAP is an imprint. The stories that didn’t make the fifth anthology were compiled into the magazine. We launched it online because we wanted more writing to get out there, and we wanted it to be free to read. It wasn’t about the money. It was about getting the kind of reach we never thought we could have. 

The funny thing is, all the recognition came after we decided to pay writers properly. The fifth anthology was longlisted for a Bram Stoker Award, and one of the stories in the online magazine was nominated as well. Even now, I haven’t really processed it. We just wanted to pay the writers. All these awards are extra. Very nice, but extra.

For me, what matters is that people are reading the work in spaces that once felt very far away from us. But I never want the chase for prizes to be the point. The literary magazine space has been shrinking, and many people think it’s unsustainable. The only thing I can really say is that I did persist. The number of times I wanted to give up… but mastery requires failure. If you want to master something, it requires lots and lots and lots of failure. You have to learn from it. And beyond the paycheck, beyond the validation, you have to believe in yourself.