Womb City
Tlotlo Tsamaase
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781645660569
Erewhon Books, January 2024, 416 pgs

In Tlotlo Tsamaase’s genre-blending Africanfuturist novel, Womb City, readers are introduced to a futuristic Botswana, where certain bodies are microchipped, their future criminal actions predicted by a machine and monitored by the authorities. When a crime is predicted, the body of the person is forfeited to the government, and their consciousness is placed in a virtual prison where they live out eternity in torment, their bodies used by others to continue an eternal life granted by the government’s system of body farming and trafficking. When the main character, Nelah, commits a heinous crime, she works to keep it hidden while the ghost of her victim haunts and threatens her family.

Tsamaase balances a science fiction dystopian world with both a ghost story and a dark comedy of errors, and does so in a way that doesn’t confuse the reader. Most of the novel’s beginning is dedicated to laying the groundwork for the world’s intricate rules, which are extremely sexist, homophobic, and racist. Bodies that can give birth and are deemed fertile are treated as farm bodies for producing more bodies that can continue the cycle of body-jumping that gives everyone in the world near eternal life. Within the story’s narrative are not-so-subtly hidden feminist views on body autonomy and queer body identity that constantly asks the question: whose body is this and who am I within this body?

The more thematic and philosophical ideas don’t take away from the novel’s narrative flow and forward progress. The beginning, however, reads slower than the rest of the text due to the expositional nature of the writing as Tsamaase onboards readers to the story world. In some places, it does slow things down to a pace that’s hard to stay fully engaged in the story, but the history, political, and societal context is important to understand the motivations of characters later in the novel. However, once Nelah murders someone, the story’s pacing and style turns to the evocative and horrific, and things start to speed up toward the middle half of the book.

There is a lot to chew on in Tsamaase’s Womb City but what fired me through the novel was the futuristic world and the ghost story(ies) at the heart of the body jumping, consciousness-switching novel. Not only did it keep me reflecting on body politics, it also kept me—during the moments of darkness—wildly uncomfortable, horrified, and shocked at the actions of the characters. Womb City is an introspective Africanfuturist horror for readers who love stories that take a swing at reductive views on gender and crime without hiding the awfulness those issues bring up.