In late 2018, a crowdfunding campaign let Nathanaël Ejob launch *Anaki*, a comic that would become one of the showcases of Cameroonian science fiction. The story unfolds on the fictional island of Tazeti, where humans, creatures and machines coexist — a world its creator describes as a symbiosis of man, beast and technology.
Ejob founded Zebra Comics in 2016 in Buea, aiming to put comics at the service of African cultures and values. He has said he grew up on Batman and Superman before realizing those stories weren't his own — a realization that pushed him to invent his own, rooted in African imagination rather than borrowed from Western tropes.
Ejob frames Afrofuturism as a political tool as much as an aesthetic one: in his view, science fiction isn't only meant to carry readers into another universe, but to imagine the country's future and build a collective consciousness — proof that Africa, too, can invent entire worlds.
His work gained wider visibility in 2019, when he designed the official poster for the 10th edition of the Mboa BD festival — Central Africa's first comic-book festival, launched in 2010 by the Collectif A3 and now chaired by Hervé Noutchaya.
That recognition fits into a broader movement: a generation of African creators refusing to leave science fiction to Western or Asian studios alone, rebuilding the continent's technological imagination out of its own myths.
For young Cameroonian readers, that shift matters: they can now see themselves in local heroes able to stand alongside international pop-culture icons — a first step toward a more structured comic-book industry on the continent.
Zebra Comics keeps expanding its catalogue from Buea, against the grain of a sector still dominated by foreign productions. Yet these trajectories remain the exception: without stronger structural support — funding, distribution, training — Cameroonian Afrofuturism risks staying a pioneers' movement rather than becoming a full-fledged industry.
