Africa has never been short of avant-garde, maverick and daring writers – one of them is a Kenyan Binyavanga Wainaina. In contemporary literary circles, Wainaina is respected for his eloquence, wit and love for the continent. It was for the same reasons he drew a full house at the auditorium of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), in Johannesburg. It turned out to be a bizarre winter evening with the writer and gay activist.
It was awkward and excruciating to listen to Wainaina, who struggled to speak without breaking mid-sentence. Sitting there, in front of his loyal admirers, he was a shadow of himself. Wainaina, with a clean-shaven head, in black kaftan adorned with an elegant necklace, sipped beer between sentences in this hour-long conversation with Wits literature lecturer Danai Mupotsa and Indian writer Achal Prabhala. Wainaina was the guest at the event titled ‘How To Write About Everything’, which echoed his essay How To Write About Africa.
In 2015, at the age of 44, Wainaina suffered a series of minor strokes that impaired his speech. I don’t know how many beers he had, but sitting in the second row, I noticed his head lolling at times.
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Like many in the audience, I had admired his work since childhood. We could have walked the same streets when I was growing up in Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape, where he lived for nine years. He stayed in Mthatha, the small town where Nelson Mandela was born, while studying accounting. He dropped out and earned a living copywriting on his way of becoming a renowned essayist.
In 2014, Wainaina was named as one of TIME’s 100 most influential people but he refused to attend the function. Similarly, in 2007, the World Economic Forum acknowledged him as a young global leader but he declined again. He said the organizers should have asked him first before publishing his name.
At the time of writing his memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place, Kenya was going through violent elections and Wainaina was home during his recess at Union College, in the United States. He said the book made it difficult for him to return to the college.
“This affected the book very immensely because it was supposed to be personal. I must tell you, many African writers face the same thing, where you say, ‘I believe in art for art’s sake, I believe I am supposed to just write this book about my life’, and then shit happens that politicizes the thing. And that is beautiful, but it doesn’t feel like that at the time,” said Wainaina.
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Wainaina is well known for his scathing reviews of fellow writers but has also fostered talent all over the world.
“…He has a kind of yearning for utopia, an Africa utopia. It’s because of his glorious heart, his capacity for love. Once we had a fight and I was in the wrong but I didn’t acknowledge it then. He taught me with grace what real friendship means and for that I will always be grateful. I love him, I respect him, I admire him, and I am glad he finally listened to me about the cut of his kaftans,” said Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in her message.
Wainaina knew at the age of 10 that he was gay but he refused to talk about it until Chimamanda asked.
“Of course, I said no. But she liberated something in me, already, just by asking me. Because normally the skies will fall if you say yes,” says Wainaina, overwhelmed with emotions in a continent that often misunderstood him.
Chimamanda’s question led him to pen his popular essay I Am a Homosexual, Mum, which was published on his birthday.
“It’s hard to describe the kind of effect it has had. It sort of stopped the world in a little while in a great way. Binyavanga, ironically, was very keen to produce this essay as a conversation he wanted to have on the African continent with people that he felt close to, rather than be published in the New Yorker, which he could have an easy access to do. Ironically, of course, the New Yorker had a headline Binyavanga Comes Out a week later. Binyavanga had to deal with the world press. There’s not a single publication anywhere in the world that didn’t cover this event,” says Prabhala.
Wainaina, and his bizarre, bombastic world, is likely to write more headlines yet.

An Awesome, Awkward, African Night

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s words cleanse the mind. They are profound, creative and thought provoking.
Adichie is the fifth of six children born to high achieving parents. Her mother, Grace Ifeoma, was the first female registrar at the University of Nigeria and her father, James Nwoye Adichie, was Nigeria’s first professor of statistics. He later became Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the same institution.
With a power couple for parents, Adichie acquired a reading habit by the age of four.
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After secondary school, Adichie studied medicine at the University of Nigeria, switched to pharmacy, and then gave it up to go to the United States (US), when she was 19, a year and a half into her studies. She obtained a scholarship to study communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia for two years, and went on to pursue a degree in communication and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University.
Adichie graduated summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State University in 2001. She later completed a master’s degree in creative writing at John Hopkins University. In 2005, she was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, and earned a master’s degree in African studies from Yale University in 2008.It was while there that she began writing Purple Hibiscus, published when she was 26. Her work has been translated into 30 languages.
Walk along Fife Street in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and you will see some of the country’s most expensive schools and scores of students sharing a laugh in the blistering sun. Look closely, and you will see many clutching Purple Hibiscus, a work studied in many high schools across Africa.
“Purple Hibiscus is one of the greatest books I have ever read. There is so much struggle and oppression in the book that I can relate to as an African. The ways she writes and describes things like heat in the book is intriguing and make it a good read. To see an African write like this is very inspiring because it shows that we can all tell our stories no matter where we come from. To think she was just 26 years old when she wrote it makes it even more intriguing,” says pupil, Charmaine Hlatshwayo, from Mzilikazi High School in Bulawayo.
Half of a Yellow Sun and the short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, were Adichie’s next great works.
She has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Orange Prize, the New York Times Notable Book prize, a People and Black Issues Book Review Best Book of the Year prize and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist.
Adichie is often described as the successor of the late Chinua Achebe. It’s a fitting coincidence that she grew up in a house that once belonged to Achebe, Nigeria’s most celebrated writer.
“Because of writers like Chinua Achebe, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized,” said Adichie at her TEDx 2009 talk, The Danger Of A Single Story.
The talk has drawn almost two million views online.
Born in Nsukka, Nigeria, on September 15, 1977, Adichie encountered injustice as she grew up. As a result, for years, the Nigerian author has inspired many with her written work and become part of pop culture. Her speeches are as powerful as her fiction.
“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls ‘You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful but not too successful otherwise you will threaten the men.’ Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage; I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important… But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same…”says Adichie at the TEDx Euston talk titled We Should All Be Feminists, in 2012.
This talk made Adichie Beyoncé’s favorite feminist. Beyoncé sampled parts of this speech on her track, Flawless in 2014. The song reportedly topped iTunes charts in 104 countries and sold nearly 850,000 copies in three days.
“I think Chimamanda is the fearless woman’s voice that has become the drumbeat of feminism. She is intelligent, articulate and knows how to use her voice to speak for women on the international stage,” says Zimbabwean author Raisedon Baya.
But that’s not all.
Adichie’s latest book, Americanah, a best-selling novel, is being turned into a movie, with award-winning Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o as lead. Brad Pitt is the producer, through his Plan B production banner along with Nyong’o and Andrea Calderwood.
The founder and treasurer of the Academic and Non-Fiction Authors’ Association of South Africa (ANFASA), Monica Seeber, says “ANFASA is delighted that an author has been selected for the FORBES AFRICA [lifetime achievement award]. This is recognition that authors have the power to influence people, events and thinking far beyond their own personal spheres. The pen is mightier than the sword.”
Adichie is carrying a banner for every woman who has grown up in Africa. In a few years, she has placed African women’s literature on the world map which makes us wonder what she will achieve in the next 20 years.

Adichie Is Africa, Africa  Is Adichie

More than a year ago, the literary world lost a towering figure, the English writer, Doris Lessing. The writer died in her London home on November 17 2013, six years after she became the oldest person – and the 11th woman – to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Born in 1919 to English subjects in what was then known as Persia, Lessing’s father, lured by the prospect of riches through maize-farming, moved the family, to what is now Zimbabwe, in 1925.
Lessing famously described her childhood as an “uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain”. She ran away from school in Harare (then Salisbury), and her family, at 14, effectively bringing her formal education to an end. She, like many female colonial writers of her time, took over her education and styled herself as a self-educated intellectual.
In 1949, a political and outspoken Lessing was forced into exile by the 1st Viscount Malvern, then Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, for her “subversive activities” and “upsetting the natives”.
She moved to London where her legendary debut, The Grass Is Singing, was published, beginning her career as a prolific writer.
Lessing was a self-proclaimed recluse. She told the BBC in a rare 1993 interview:  “I very much like being by myself&#8230;I am practical, I think I’d very much enjoy being a castaway.”
But despite the love of being by herself, Lessing gave back. Her parting gifts to Zimbabwe, the only world she had known in her younger years, were 3,000 titles from her personal collection to a leading public library in Harare.
In her Nobel Prize speech in 2007, she hinted at this saying: “Everybody I met [in Zimbabwe], everyone, begged for books.”
The writer was 94 when she died.

BRITAIN NOBEL PRIZE LESSING

True To Her Word

I like to talk to the common people, I don’t like politics.”
Mae Azango sits on the edge of her bed in her old home that is wedged in a rocky enclave between the gray United States embassy and the modern apartments occupied by expatriate workers in Mamba Point, the poshest part of Monrovia, Liberia. Azango’s larger-than-life personality fills every inch of the dim, cramped, lemon-colored room where she lives with her 11-year-old daughter, Madasi. Within five minutes Azango has hijacked the interview and is yelling out the story of how she came to be one of the best-known female journalists in Liberia. Without a hint of irony, Azango refers to herself in the third person, claims to be a household name and universally feared by Liberia’s political establishment; then announces to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf that she will never compromise herself by taking a job from her.
Some might say Azango likes to bluff or show off, but the 41-year-old single mother is one of a new generation of headstrong female journalists, who are not afraid to compete with their male counterparts or reel off lists of their achievements.
“This breed is more aggressive than what we had before,” says Elizabeth Hoff, who was the first female managing editor of a Liberian newspaper and the first woman to be elected president of the Press Union of Liberia (PUL).
Hoff, who now serves as deputy information minister, remained an editor throughout the heat of Liberia’s 14-year civil war that ended in 2003. She says a lot has changed since she worked in journalism, when many women left the profession out of fear for their safety. Those who stayed on fought sexism and struggled to win respect from their male colleagues.
Azango is one of a handful of female journalists in Liberia who have not only earned respect from their male colleagues, but also international recognition. She is part of New Narratives, an organization that supports independent media in Liberia. Founded and headed by Prue Clarke, an Australian foreign correspondent who reported in Africa for a number of years, the organization was set up in 2010, with funding from a Goldman Sachs partner. New Narratives teamed up the muckraking daily newspaper FrontPage Africa, for which Azango and the other fellows work.
These reporters have driven much of the hard-hitting reporting on violence against women and girls in Liberia, ranging from stories on child rape, teen prostitution, maternal health, corruption and education, for which they have won domestic and international accolades.
Azango received the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) International Press Freedom award in 2012 for her controversial reporting on female circumcision, a practice that takes place in the traditional Sande societies that exist within 10 of Liberia’s 16 tribes. She says she received death threats and was forced into hiding, moving from house to house and avoiding the newspaper office for a month. Mohamed Keita, the advocacy coordinator for CPJ’s Africa Program, described Azango as “outspoken”, “fearless”, and “persistent.”
But this was not the first time Azango had experienced threats of violence. Like her other female colleagues who are part of New Narratives, Azango’s experiences of coming of age during the war compelled her to become a journalist and report on the struggles of women and girls.
Azango recounts, in vivid detail, a memory from the early days of the war, when she was 18-years-old and pregnant with her first child, Victor, who is now 22. She says the pregnancy saved her from being forcibly taken as a girlfriend by a rebel.
Charles Taylor’s forces had closed in on Monrovia and Azango was picking potatoes around her home. She kept crossing a checkpoint that was controlled by a fierce commander.
“‘Why am I keep seeing a pregnant woman?’ he yelled. ‘I am looking for a young girl and she is spoiled, why is she in front of me? At the count of five if you don’t disappear I will spray you.’ I was running like a cut, dead dog,” says Azango.
With a father who was an associate Supreme Court justice and a mother who was a teacher, Azango initially aspired to be a hotel manager. But after 10 years of war in her homeland, Azango’s memories of a privileged childhood were replaced with raw experiences of being a poor refugee in neighboring Côte d’Ivoire.
When she returned from exile in 2000, Azango studied journalism at the University of Liberia and has never looked back. Unlike most journalists who focus on the sensational stories surrounding the political establishment, Azango writes about the masses, the ordinary Liberians who live on less than a dollar a day.
“I like to talk to the common people, I don’t like politics,” Azango tells FORBES WOMAN AFRICA. “Why? Because I feel politics come and go.”
But she is committed to journalism that delivers political change. Her reporting attracted so much international attention that the government called for an end to female genital mutilation, although Azango says it continues. Azango’s report on the alleged rape of a 13-year-old girl by a police officer who walked free for over three months, led to the his arrest.
While the horrific violence perpetrated against women during Liberia’s civil war has come to an end, many Liberian women and girls continue to struggle with sexism and abuse and it doesn’t stop in the workplace. One renowned journalist and editor, who died recently, even had a policy of not hiring female reporters.
Wade Williams, 31, is one of two female newsroom chiefs in Liberia, also a New Narratives fellow and Azango&#8217;s colleague and friend. Her past three years at FrontPage Africa have proved challenging, with some of her male colleagues hesitant to accept her leading role. But after three years in the job, the reporters have grown to respect her and women have taken a leading role in the newspaper headed by journalist and editor Rodney Sieh.
Last year Williams became the second Liberian woman to win Journalist of the Year at the PUL awards, since the press union was established in 1964.
For Clarke, these achievements have led to a major shift in how female journalists are perceived in Liberia.
“The sheer fact that women, who were once considered worthy of being nothing more than anchors and doing entertainment, are now breaking the most important stories in Liberia and are among the most credible journalists in Liberia has revolutionized everything,” Clarke tells FORBES WOMAN AFRICA.
Back in Azango’s room we discuss the future of her career. She is uncertain as to whether she wants to continue being a journalist or become an activist working with abused women. The line between activism and journalism has always been a thin one for Azango.
As we leave her house she stands on the stoop and yells, “thank you for taking up my whole day,” in a sarcastic tone, pretending not to have enjoyed telling her story. Dressed in leggings, a bright red t-shirt and floral hair tie, Azango is surrounded by children and women with white knuckles rubbing wet clothes against washing racks. She flashes her broad smile and flips out a nonchalant wave. Perhaps she has reason to bluff.

Tag: Writer

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

An Awesome, Awkward, African Night

Adichie Is Africa, Africa Is Adichie

True To Her Word

Words Mightier Than The Sword