What most resonates with me in watching this 15-minute presentation by Wanuri Kahiu (writer/director of Pumzi) are her comments about the imaginative stories her mother would tell her when she was a child, which she (Wanuri) has now come to realize really were science fiction.

It immediately sent me back to my youth, when the older folks in our family (immediate and extended) would also tell us these imaginative, dare I say *speculative fiction* stories that I was entertained by at the time (or scared by, if that was the intent), but haven't really thought of beyond simply being remnants of my childhood.

This made me realize the wealth of ideas for stories that I have to draw from, as a filmmaker myself.

We tend to look beyond ourselves for those great, original story ideas, when several might already exist much closer to home than we might realize; and, in my case, many of them are fantasy/science fiction/speculative fiction/Afrofuturist even.

Anyway… Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu on Afrofuturism – a TEDx talk she gave in Nairobi in July: