Non-Human, Non-Living, and Gender: Developments of African Magic Realism in Khadija Abdalla Bajaber and Sharon Dodua Otoo

The chapter deals with two recent novels from the field of African magic realism: Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s The House of Rust (2021) and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum (2021), both dealing with gender issues through their young protagonists. It develops an analysis of the literary strategies that these two books employ in relation to time, space, animal beings and sentient objects. It is here argued that both writers make use of ecocritical and Afro-futurist elements, even though they fall into such genres only marginally. Some reflections are devoted to their similarities and differences from the writers who inaugurated anglophone African magic realism in the 1980s and 1990s. In its conclusion, the chapter relates Abdalla Bajaber’s and Otoo’s forms of magic realism to visions of African future(s) elaborated by some of the continent’s contemporary thinkers