African Myths of Utilitarian Magic

Chinenye Egbuna Ikwuemesi's groundbreaking Afromantasy world where ancestral wisdom transforms everyday tools into powerful enchantments.

African Myths of Utilitarian Magic

Where Ingenuity Becomes Enchantment

Introduction: What Is Utilitarian Magic?

African myths have long been misunderstood as ornamental, spiritual, or purely symbolic. But hidden in the rhythms of precolonial life were stories where magic was practical, ritual was engineering, and spiritual power was embedded into the very tools of survival.

This pillar collects and curates a new genre: Utilitarian Magic — an Afrofantasy framework where the ordinary becomes sublime, and where African innovation is not lost to history but reborn as myth.

Here, ironworkers forge blades that remember, weavers embed secrets into thread, and river-walkers wear shoes that part the flood. These are not the high spells of empires — they are the subtle enchantments of problem-solving peoples. Magic, here, is infrastructure. Beauty, here, is function. This is Afrofantasy with memory.

Why I Created This

Too many tales and real life instances of African brilliance were destroyed, silenced, or unrecorded. The botanical wisdom of healers, the arithmetic of astrologers, the instruments of soil stewards — all fragmented or forgotten by colonial erasure. We will never fully recover the true scale of what was lost.

So I have chosen to do what mythmakers have always done: restore through story.

The Codex of Utilitarian Magic was conceived as a resurrection space — to imagine the practical genius of African technologies as magic systems. These tales are not re-enactments. They are what might have been if African invention had been given the freedom to evolve uninterrupted.

This is our spell of remembrance.

Relationship to Afrodeities & Afromantasy

This codex lives squarely inside the Magic Codex of the Afrodeities canon. It is part of the Afromantasy project — a world where African cosmologies generate not only myth, but systems.

Where most fantasy elevates the spectacular, Afromantasy elevates the systemic sublime:

Not magic for magic’s sake — but for work, care, defense, restoration
Not kings with crowns — but caretakers with codes

Utilitarian Magic is the genre-child of imagination and infrastructure.

Who It’s For

Writers seeking new magic systems grounded in African logic
Educators exploring alternative epistemologies of invention
Artists building visual languages of African techno-magic
Readers and dreamers who want fantasy that feels rooted, real, and radiant
Diaspora youth searching for stories where their ancestors build, not just survive

Sample Tales You’ll Find Here

The Nightsoil Tiles – On faeces, fermentation, and flame
Echo Beads – On grief, sound, and resonance
Oracle Bone Mask – On sacrifice and truth-seeing
Blood-Finders – On scent, betrayal, and the politics of justice
The Binding Gods – On rope, salt, and sealed oaths
The Brotherhood of Incivility – On glamour, defiance, and dressing power

…and more to come.

What This Pillar Offers

A growing library of tales
Visuals and illustrations for worldbuilding
Prompts for Midjourney and character design
Lore and mytho-mechanical explanations
Pathways to integrate stories into your own Afrofantasy projects

Read the Stories

Explore our living codex of African myths reimagined through the lens of magical utility. These are the technologies of what could have been.

This collection sits within the wider Afrodeities universe, drawing from African mythology as a civilisational record — not mere folklore and functioning as a mythological corrective to the historical erasure of African science, systems, and stories.

The Time Keepers Apprentice

How These Tales Work

Each story in this codex imagines a character, a moment, or a tradition where an ordinary item or skill becomes a magical force:

A seamstress whose thread stitches memories into cloth
A cook whose spices can change a person’s fate
A potter whose clay jars leak lies but hold truth
A twin who bends shadow into shelter
A blood-finder who detects betrayal by scent

These are not Western-style wizards. These are artisans, mothers, farmers, midwives — wielding an ancestral logic where the line between survival and spell is thin.