This conversation took place at the book launch for Professor Francis Nyamnjoh’s latest novel, Digital Uprising: The Flower of Freedom in Mimboland, held during the 2025 Anthropology Southern Africa conference. The event brought together scholars, students, writers, and members of the public to explore the intersections of anthropology, politics, and speculative fiction. Dr. Tian Chen — Council member of the Anthropology Southern Africa Association and Communication Strategist at the World Anthropological Union — served as discussant. The novel, published by Langaa, is Professor Nyamnjoh’s eleventh work of fiction and blends satire, political allegory, and near‑future technological speculation to examine power, conscience, and the difficult work of rebuilding after revolution.
Dr. Tian Chen: Professor Nyamnjoh, we know your other identity — the academic — quite well. But here, at the Anthropology Southern Africa conference, we get a buy‑one‑get‑one package: the academic and the fiction writer. Can you tell us about your fiction career? This is your eleventh novel, yes?
Professor Francis Nyamnjoh: Yes. I’m fortunate to be an anthropologist because fieldwork produces so much material. We take copious field notes, collect stories, and make interpretations. When we condense that work into a thesis or an article, a lot gets left out. I’ve long been interested in those “leftovers” — the details, voices, and contradictions that academic formats cannot fully accommodate. Fiction gives me a license to tinker: to take recognizable traits, combine elements from different people, and compose composite characters. Figures like Longstay or Liberté function more effectively as composites — amplified, emblematic — than they would if I tried to pin them to a single, named individual.
Dr. Tian Chen: Since we’re on characters, let’s begin there. You don’t need to read the book to know who President Longstay is. Where did that name come from?
Professor Francis Nyamnjoh: Longstay is shorthand for a certain kind of leader: someone who comes to power, falls in love with it, and refuses to let go. Whether democracy demands a handover or public opinion turns, these leaders are tenacious. Power becomes an affliction that anchors them in place. To give him a specific name would narrow him to a single prototype. By naming him Longstay, he functions as a representative — wherever you see a leader clinging to power, you see Longstay.
Dr. Tian Chen: Your other protagonist is Liberté.
Professor Francis Nyamnjoh: Liberté is Longstay’s daughter — born of a relationship he refused to acknowledge. One of the perks of power is the ability to violate and discard people with impunity, and he did not recognize Liberté’s mother. That absence shaped Liberté’s childhood: a distant father, social disadvantage, and the bitterness of being unacknowledged. Yet she blossoms into a leader — a Gen‑Z activist who refuses the easy scripts of victimhood. Where ordinary institutions fail her community, Liberté steps in: she insists that families, social bonds, and civic life can be sites of resistance. In her eyes, Longstay is a monster to be exposed — not only for what he has done, but for what his refusal to leave power represents.
Dr. Tian Chen: We already have two compelling characters, but some figures in the book are deliberately nameless, like the First Lady. Why did you choose to deny her a full name?
Professor Francis Nyamnjoh: The First Lady functions, much like Longstay, as an archetype. She stands for that composite figure — a First Lady in many contexts. In this novel she has moral fiber: she becomes part of the revolution, develops conscience, and responds to the suffering ordinary people endure under her husband’s rule. Denying her a proper name helps keep her symbolic reach broad. Sometimes a name narrows a character; leaving her partially unnamed preserves her moral mission and gives her an emblematic quality.
Dr. Tian Chen: There are moments in the book that had me laughing and then thinking about everyday habits — like when you reach for face cream. You’ve hidden nanobots in the First Lady’s face cream as an instrument of transformation. Where did that idea come from?
Professor Francis Nyamnjoh: I wanted to explore how technology can be domesticated — how the same tools dictators use to entrench themselves can be turned against them. The novel is situated in an era of fascination and anxiety about AI, so I read up on what was imaginably possible. Nanobots, as near-invisible actors that can alter bodies and minds, seemed a fitting speculative device. In the story they are embedded in cosmetics and other everyday media. They’re used by multiple actors: by the revolutionaries to catalyze change, and by the dictator himself as he seeks to cheat mortality. He commissions scientists to create a digital, amplified version of himself — a loud, intrusive presence that can be implanted in his wife’s head to steer her consciousness. It’s a grotesque inversion of representation: she, young and beautiful, becomes the public face of his control while he sits frail and remote, holding a smartphone and a remote control in hand, flipping from one channel to another and a smartphone to call and discipline the republic.
Dr. Tian Chen: But until here, it’s only half of the story. Democracy still has a long way to go. What inspired you to write the rest of the journey?
Professor Francis Nyamnjoh: Exactly. We often take shortcuts when we talk about change. Toppling a dictator is an important moment, but it is only one element of transformation. The flower of freedom needs tending — it must be nurtured, directed, and cultivated if society is to be reconstituted. Rebuilding after a rupture is a painstaking, unfinished business. In the book, the dictator is toppled with the help of Adonis-Amba — a lovebot — and that event initiates a cascade of transformations. The lovebot helps the First Lady learn what a loving relationship can be, rather than one built on power and coercion. But the fall of a ruler does not automatically uproot the mechanisms of repression. There are tentacles and roots that persist — patronage networks, bureaucracies, corrupted norms — and they have to be unplugged deliberately. Real change requires time, patience, and collective commitment.
Dr. Tian Chen: I want to turn to the writing process and then open the floor to questions. You said many of your fictional elements come from the “leftovers” of your fieldwork. What does your actual writing process look like?
Professor Francis Nyamnjoh: I encourage students to keep field notes precisely because they preserve the textures of lived life — details that disappear when you wait until the end to document. When I read those notes I often see budding storytellers: people who record scenes, snippets of dialogue, and small ironies that are immediately compelling. Field notes give you a freedom of voice and a range of registers that academic writing usually restrains. In scholarship we are taught to frame, reference, and theorize; fiction allows you to harness the same observations and inject them into dialogue in ways that academic prose often disallows. I find the two practices — scholarly and creative writing — to be kindred. They come from the same family of attention to human detail; they simply wear different clothes.
Dr. Tian Chen: And of course, when you write fiction you reach audiences beyond the academy. How has that experience been?
Professor Francis Nyamnjoh: It’s not entirely different. Sometimes academics want to relax, to read and speak in registers that are less formal and less scripted. Fiction speaks to them too. But fiction also lets you translate ideas for the broader public — to render abstruse debates about power, technology, and ethics into stories that people outside universities can hold and discuss. For example, I’ve been working on a short story about incompleteness and conviviality: one character obsessed with completeness and total victory, another embodying compassion and the openness of incompleteness. The tale takes place in a computer game where you kill avatars without shedding tears. I want to use that setup to explore how empathy and convivial life might be cultivated in an increasingly virtual, outcome-driven world. When the short story is ready, I’ll make sure you see it first.
Dr. Tian Chen: So we already have the next thing to look forward to. For this book, I’m curious about your publisher. You often choose small, unusual presses. This time it’s Langaa. Why Langaa?
Professor Francis Nyamnjoh: I’m interested in redeeming and rebuilding — giving voice to stories from unlikely places. Langaa is one of those presses that operates between crevices: outside the state apparatus and beyond big commercial circuits. It gives space to writers and stories that might otherwise fall through the cracks. There’s a kind of politics in that choice: to publish with a press that has no grand brand name, and to insist that “the nameless” have a place.