The Last African Outpost in the Solar System

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 107
Mike Resnick, Kirinyaga: a Fable of Utopia

Koriba is the mundumugu, the great priest-healer, of his tribe, the Kikuyu. Sure, he has a Westernized education and speaks English fluently; but he rejected his European learning to become his people’s spiritual guide. Sadly for him, his Kenyan homeland is overrun with technology and silicon; his Africa has no place for African ways. So he has led his tribe to a new settlement: a terraformed planetoid called Kirinyaga, out amid the solar system.

Mike Resnick’s science fiction was often heavily influenced by myth and fable, and his stories, including the eight interconnecting narratives which comprise this novel, often functioned as modern parables. He first began visiting Kenya as a trophy hunter; he later became fascinated by the indigenous cultures. He especially respected the ways African societies adapt to colonial influences, while retaining their unique characters. But this respect was tempered by trepidation.

In this setting, the Kikuyu people have named their adopted homeland Kirinyaga, their native name for the mountain Europeans call Kilimanjaro. Koriba, our first-person narrator, repeats this fact frequently, emphasizing the almost-Zionist nature of his culture. His people have struggled to recreate the experience of living in pre-colonial Africa, hunting game and farming dryland crops. Koriba himself has spearheaded the effort to reconstruct traditional Kikuyu religion.

The experience is deeply imperfect, however. The Kikuyu language is dead, so Koriba’s people speak Swahili, something Koriba, a trained classicist, finds distasteful. Lions and elephants are extinct, so the Kikuyu have populated their homeworld with as much African wildlife as possible; but without predators to stabilize populations, bottom-feeders quickly strain the ecosystem. Koriba must frequently use European technology to restore the balance.

Most important, Kirinyaga receives its license to operate from Maintenance, a bureaucratic institution that oversees terraformed planetoids. Maintenance means well, and seeks to ensure rights and autonomy for various populations. However, its primarily White membership has a frustrating tendency to enforce its own ideals upon license-holders, like the Kikuyu. Koriba balks at what he perceives, with some justification, as an extension of European colonialism.

Resnick was deeply conscious about the moral compromise inherent in himself, a White American, writing a story of African characters, using a Black African narrator. In interviews, he expressed his trepidations, yet admitted this was essentially a story of outsidership. His themes are not innately Africa, nor Black; beneath the surface, his story deals with themes about the balance between tradition and innovation, and how maintaining that balance can be deadly.

Mike Resnick

Koriba has a powerful ally in Koinnage, chief of the settlement. Between them, they represent the two authorities which govern traditional life: while Koriba tends to his people’s spiritual hungers, Koinnage handles the politics, and traffics with Maintenance. Both, however, face problems common to utopian thinkers throughout history. They have romantic ideals, often at odds with daily life. Both are European-educated, but trying to reconstruct African society.

And both are getting old.

This novel’s third principal character is Ndemi, Koriba’s student, whom Koriba hopes will eventually inherit his responsibilities. (Koriba failed to adopt a girl student, a tragedy which haunts him.) Ndemi was born on Kirinyaga, raised on Koriba’s African parables and Koinnage’s political ideals. As he approaches adulthood under Koriba’s tutelage, however, Ndemi discovers how compromise with European bureaucracy has tainted his people’s culture.

Because Koriba reflects the twin impulses of utopianism, themes which have colored utopian (and dystopian) literature throughout the last century. He has strong beliefs, and clings to them desperately. Koriba’s desire to preserve his people’s identity comes at great human cost, including, on occasion, innocent lives. His belief in capital-T Truth justifies him lying to his people and keeping Ndemi, his future heir, in the dark.

But strong beliefs don’t feed the utopian family. Little hardships make rank-and-file villagers, including Ndemi, question Koriba’s convictions. Couldn’t we make one little change, they ask, or adopt one European technology, to make village life less onerous? Koriba always refuses, believing that any change will make his people no longer Kikuyu. Tradition and morality have become, for him, their own ends. The people’s hunger is secondary at best.

Nearly a quarter-century after publication, it’s tempting to look backward and assume Mike Resnick considered himself a White Savior, writing about Africans’ concerns. But using that paradigm, I quickly realized: Koriba is Black, but he’s a White Savior himself. His traditionalist African beliefs are so ascendant, he’s incapable of understanding the harm he does by doing good. That, perhaps, was Resnick’s message. But he conveys that message so artfully, he never descends to preaching.