Jacque Njeri’s MaaSci collages send Maasai figures beyond the familiar landscapes in which they are usually photographed. Across the series, people in distinctive dress walk on a moon, travel in UFOs and sit near celestial forms that have appeared in earthly terrain. The pictures do not ask whether a real Maasai space programme is under construction. They ask why a viewer might accept the costume and machinery of science fiction as belonging to one part of the world but hesitate when an East African person is placed inside that frame.
Njeri is a Kenyan digital artist and designer whose work depends on a carefully managed collision. She brings photographic figures into science fiction settings, then layers the components so they form a coherent scene while retaining an element of surprise. A 2017 interview with Bubblegum Club describes the technique: she attends to the stance and placement of the people she uses so that the finished images can initially read as photographs rather than obvious collages. The instant of uncertainty matters. The viewer has to look again to discover how the world has been assembled.
The series has been called Afrofuturist, and Njeri has welcomed the term while defining it for herself. In that interview she described it as a way to claim a future for and by Africans. She also discussed the risk of reducing cultural life to an image frozen in the past. The Maasai figures in MaaSci carry signs of a lived history; the collages place them in scenes of discovery rather than treating them as exhibits of what other people presume to be timeless. Njeri’s question is visual before it is verbal: what changes when the imagined future includes the person who was supposed to stand outside it?
A collage built to move
Njeri trained in design and worked in advertising before MaaSci altered the direction of her practice. In a 2019 first-person interview with Africultures, she described drawing from childhood, studying art and design, and first experimenting with Photoshop compositions in 2014. Her earlier work Afrobot was selected to promote the Sondeka Festival. Returning to digital collage in 2017, she decided to make new images rather than reproduce the earlier piece. The shift matters because MaaSci was not born as an abstract manifesto. It grew from the practical discovery that a designer’s familiar tools could make an unfamiliar world.
A designer understands that scale, placement and texture change what an image says. In Njeri’s collages, those choices are politically charged. Place a figure at the edge of a scene and they may seem to be watching an adventure designed for someone else. Give that figure the central axis and the scene begins to belong to them. Make the setting too smooth and it becomes a generic science fiction backdrop. Keep a trace of weather, wear or earthly material and the scene can retain the feel of a place people might actually occupy. Her training allows these decisions to be made with apparent ease, but their effects are exact.
Njeri has cited the worn texture of Star Wars settings, particularly Tatooine, as one influence on her sense that futurism need not look spotless. That is a more specific claim than saying she borrowed an entire fictional universe. She noticed how a setting could appear used and still be imagined as technologically advanced. In her work, the combination undermines the old visual division between “traditional” Africa and “modern” elsewhere. A fabric or shield does not have to disappear before a figure can travel through space. The science fiction setting becomes richer because it contains signs of cultural continuity.
In a 2017 conversation with OkayAfrica, Njeri described her earlier Stamp series as an effort to animate figures already printed within a fixed graphic frame. She made four compositions named Nzumari, Blossom, Freedom and Breakthrough before turning two images toward Afrofuturism. The stamp gave her a small, pre-existing public image to work against. MaaSci then released figures into settings whose scale exceeded any national emblem. The shift in format expanded the distances a figure could appear to travel.
Another image makes her interest in public representation concrete without repeating MaaSci’s space journey. Africultures reproduces King Mathi, a portrait Njeri made for Mau Mau Dreams. In Njeri’s account, the available photographs of resistance leader Dedan Kimathi showed him in hospital, in court or near death. Her completed portrait instead gives him a crown and the radiant bearing of a hero. The crown is a deliberate change in pictorial rank: it refuses to let the archive’s surviving images dictate the only posture in which later generations can see him. In MaaSci, Njeri projects people beyond a horizon that popular science fiction had rarely allowed them to cross. In King Mathi, she turns back toward a historical figure whose available photographs recorded colonial confinement rather than the courage for which he is remembered. Both interventions begin with an inherited image and move its subject into another visual order, yet the second work is historical reinterpretation, as Njeri says, not a futuristic scene. She later paused the larger Mau Mau Dreams project because the photographs needed for other portraits were difficult to find. The finished King Mathi remains a specific image within that unfinished research.
The danger of a familiar figure
Choosing Maasai people for the series was not a neutral act. Maasai visual culture is internationally recognizable, often through tourism and documentary photography that turns living people into a shorthand for an “unchanged” Africa. Njeri described selecting them for the strength of that recognizable aesthetic within science fiction compositions. She also acknowledged in later interviews that audiences repeatedly assumed she herself was Maasai; she identifies as Kikuyu. Her work therefore opens an important tension. The visual language can disrupt a stereotype about time while still relying on a figure that many viewers approach through other stereotypes.
The collages handle that tension through agency of placement. The people pictured are not passive specimens set against a future that belongs elsewhere. They stand, travel and explore within the scene. A viewer may still bring assumptions to their clothing, but the setting refuses the expectation that recognizable cultural dress fixes a person to one era. Njeri does not need to erase difference to show technological possibility. The future is large enough to contain people who do not all dress alike.
This is one reason the images have drawn both enthusiasm and questions. They are accessible at a glance: a Maasai figure in space is a striking reversal of the viewer’s likely expectation. But the glance is only the first stage. One can then ask why the reversal was needed, whose cultural image is being used and how a collage produces its authority. The image gains force when it is treated as an invitation to think rather than a slogan that settles the matter of representation.
Njeri addressed the broader issue in a 2024 interview with Südwind, describing her collages as resistance to pictures of a white future. She wanted Black explorers and inventors to appear within fantasy and science fiction, where they had often been scarce. That aim does not demand a future in which everyone looks the same. In the 2019 Africultures conversation, she worried that science fiction often imagines progress as cultural uniformity. For her, technological change should not require people to abandon the practices that distinguish them.
The stories she would not force
After MaaSci, Njeri discussed The Mau Mau Dream, a project intended to recast Kenyan freedom fighters as heroes with a visual presence commensurate with their importance. The plan encountered a material obstacle. Photographs of some figures she wanted to include were scarce or unavailable, and a photo-based collage could not simply invent documentary evidence. In the Africultures interview, she said she had paused the project while seeking deeper research. That decision is part of her artistic story. Digital tools make combination easy, but they do not create a responsible archive where one is missing.
Njeri was clear that this backward-looking project differed from MaaSci. It was about how people had been pictured in history, rather than a science fiction voyage. The two projects still illuminate one another. One asks why a Kenyan person was absent from the future; the other asks why a freedom fighter’s available portrait may fail to convey the life remembered by a community. In both, the image is not a neutral window. It shapes the role a person can occupy in public imagination.
She also began thinking about women in Kikuyu histories and described a possible project on matriarchal narratives. The research questions opened by MaaSci grew more local and more archival in her conversations, while the images that first made her known continued to circulate. Her turn toward archives and local accounts also prevents MaaSci from being read as an artist’s permanent assignment to place Maasai people in space. The series is a beginning within a wider practice of reimagining visual authority.
In a 2022 OkayAfrica conversation, she discussed Genesis, a project drawing on Gikuyu stories, and the challenges of making and circulating digital art. Her movement from MaaSci toward another Kenyan cultural history gives her work more depth than the reputation of one viral idea. It also changes who is speaking from within the image. Njeri can turn from a widely recognized cultural figure to stories closer to her own family and community without asking either project to represent a whole nation.
The digital tool and the public world
MaaSci circulated widely online and took Njeri into exhibitions and conversations far beyond Nairobi. Its digital form made that circulation possible, yet the medium is not just a delivery system. Collage is built from fragments whose original contexts were not designed to meet. Each new composition can expose a seam in the images through which a culture has been represented. In MaaSci, a familiar ethnographic or tourist expectation collides with a genre image of cosmic travel. The new whole is deliberately impossible, but the viewer’s expectation becomes visible through the impossibility.
Njeri’s own account of learning Photoshop is useful here. Software did not produce the idea by itself. It allowed her to test how figures could inhabit a world with different spatial rules. As her skills changed, she could return to an earlier impulse and give it more complex form. The act of revision is central to the artistic claim. Futures do not appear finished on the first attempt; they are made by recombining material, noticing what fails and deciding what should be carried forward.
The series also reached a point where its public reception fed back into the artist’s decisions. In 2019 Njeri said that the attention had changed her professional path and taken her to places she had not expected to visit. That is a measurable outcome of a speculative image. A collage about who might travel became part of its maker’s own travel, though the two forms of movement are different. One belongs to fiction; the other to an artist negotiating invitations, talks and new opportunities.
Her concern with digital circulation extends to questions of ownership and value. In the 2022 conversation, she discussed non-fungible tokens and the possibility of African artists making space for themselves in changing online markets. The technology is not a guarantee of fair compensation. What matters is whether creators can control how their images circulate and benefit from the attention they draw. This connects the future shown in her art to the future of the artist’s working life. Representation is more than appearing in a picture if the person making the picture has little power over its use.
A horizon with room for difference
Krull’s Futuristic Dreams editorial asks how the present of the Democratic Republic of Congo might look under different historical conditions. Njeri’s MaaSci begins from a different visual problem in Kenya and places recognizable people in science fiction space. Both use styling to unsettle what an audience has learned to call plausible. Their methods remain distinct: Krull’s photographs involve people in a fashion editorial and conversation, while Njeri’s digital collages combine source images into impossible scenes.
The force of MaaSci lies in how little explanation the first image needs. A person stands where genre convention suggested they would not stand. The next question is harder: why did the convention feel natural? Njeri lets the eye experience that correction before the viewer has settled on a theory. The collage’s textures and placements keep the scene coherent enough to invite attention, and strange enough to prevent the viewer from passing it off as an ordinary photograph.
Her later writing on Area Nyaga says that the MaaSci world has continued to grow, with ecological intelligence and inherited knowledge becoming part of a larger imagined settlement. The expansion makes the original series less like a single joke about space travel and more like an opening in a developing speculative geography. Its inhabitants can carry traditions into new environments, rather than being assigned a museum-like role in the old ones.
Njeri has said that the future need not require uniformity. Her images make that argument in a direct visual form. They carry specific clothes, faces and postures into scenes that cinema and advertising have often reserved for others. The distance traveled is imagined, but the change in perspective is real. After looking at MaaSci, the old horizon appears less like a natural limit and more like the edge of somebody else’s composition. Njeri moves the figure, and the horizon moves with them.