How to Save the World, Yet Keep the Aliens’ Infrastructure

Jenna N. Hanchey and Godfried Asante bring Audre Lorde’s famous proposition that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house into conversation with Tade Thompson’s Wormwood Trilogy. They ask a deliberately counterintuitive question: when the technology of colonial power is already embedded in people’s lives, must liberation begin by destroying it entirely? Through Oyin Da, a character in the trilogy’s final novel, The Rosewater Redemption, the essay considers a form of resistance that neither obeys infrastructure’s original logic nor pretends to emerge untouched. This reading discusses plot developments from the later trilogy.

In the novels, the Homians use the xenosphere to transform human life, storing consciousness within an alien organic infrastructure. Oyin Da is neither fully alive nor dead, yet can continue to exist only through that system; she, her wife Nike, and their daughter Junior also make a family there. Her ally Kaaro initially sees the xenosphere as colonial control itself and wants to destroy it. Oyin Da argues that this binary cannot answer how people already altered by the system are to live. She instead repurposes the infrastructure from within, redirecting its capacities against its makers. Her body is no longer dictated by colonial authority but can be imagined and projected differently in digital space; the home she and Nike continually negotiate and rebuild need not conform to the colonial state’s preferred heterosexual nuclear family.

Hanchey and Asante place this narrative within Africanfuturism, distinguishing it from broader Afrofuturist imaginaries: Africa is not an exotic stage for future technology, but a starting point grounded in African postcolonial realities, historical movement, and situated lives. The xenosphere therefore works as more than a science-fiction device. It becomes an allegory for infrastructures in ordinary life: law, education, capital, and systems of knowledge can dominate people while also becoming conditions they cannot simply exit. Oyin Da does not make the tool innocent; she changes whom it serves, what bodies and kinship it can hold, and who can redirect its use.

Yet repurposing is not a cost-free victory. Oyin Da’s plan may destroy millions of Homian consciousnesses, a choice she recognizes as leaving lasting moral damage. The essay does not reduce her action to pure justice, nor demand that people living under colonial power resist only in ways that cause no harm. This dilemma makes the central question concrete: when a system of domination is entangled with the conditions that sustain life, resistance must judge how to interrupt control, which relations to protect, and which harms cannot be justified. Reconfiguring the master’s house does not guarantee that it will cease to injure; it makes strategies beyond “destroy or submit” imaginable.

This is not a prescription that can simply be applied to every institution. The essay analyzes a Nigerian-set science-fiction trilogy and one character, not real-world technology or colonial institutions in general. Its force lies in showing how dependence and resistance can coexist, while placing queer women’s bodies, kinship, and futures at the centre of infrastructure design. Read alongside FemRes’s Audre Lorde essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”, the article shows how Hanchey and Asante borrow a canonical proposition and push it toward a context-specific question. The useful takeaway is not a slogan to “keep old systems,” but a harder set of questions: who has power to transform infrastructure? Who benefits from the change, and who continues to bear its harms? Which parts can be rewritten, and which must be dismantled?

Source. Jenna N. Hanchey and Godfried Asante, “‘How to Save the World from Aliens, Yet Keep Their Infrastructure’: Repurposing the ‘Master’s House’ in The Wormwood Trilogy,” Feminist Africa 2(2). The journal page provides the full article and download.