Women and Modern Misogyny

So I just finished watching Girl with the Dragoon Tattoo. The original Swedish one – not the Daniel Craig version. While I enjoyed the film, I found it strange that a film that is ostensibly about fighting against misogyny lingered almost lovingly on scenes of rape and violence against the main female character, Lisbeth Salander. And even though she kicks ass, in the end, she still needs the approval of her male lover (which was confusing to me, as earlier in the movie we see her waking up naked next to a female companion) to sanction her act of self-defence and defiance. The whole thing got me thinking about modern misogyny. Why do so many men hate women?

An Interview with Akumbu Uche

I don't know why I never put this up, but over the Christmas break I did an interview with the lovely Akumbu Uche, a blogger and writer in Abuja. She's one of those amazingly productive people who make you realize how much potential this country has. 

The original can be found here, but you can also read it below:

The rise of African science fiction

There is something bubbling beneath the surface in the world of science fiction and fantasy as we know it. I'm a little late to the game on this blog, but I've been following some really cool examples of African Science Fiction - and I distinguish Sci-fi by Africans from Sci-fi and fantasy written by non-Africans but set in Africa - and I wanted to share some findings with you.

First there's the truly exciting AfroSF anthology coming later this year. The anthology is open to submissions from African writers only on the continent and in the Diaspora. It will be edited by Zimbabwean author Ivor Hartmann. The deadline for submissions is May 31st, 2012. I would encourage everyone who's doing anything in this genre to apply.

Some other really cool things I discovered over the past year include the two African science fiction movies: Pumzi and Kajoola. Haven't seen either yet, but I've heard good things about both.

Then there's Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death which won the World Fantasy Award last year. It's a wonderful novel set in a futuristic Africa. And her Young Adult novel, Akata Witch, about a young Nigerian girl with special abilities coming soon to Naija! And let's not forget the Griots anthology of African and African-American science-fiction on shelves now.

It's a good time to be an Afro Sci-fi nerd, isn't it?

The Truth Behind the Noise

Welcome to 2012, everyone. First, I must apologise for my long absence last year. Things have been tough for the girl – but she’s looking ahead to brighter days. It may be a positive self deception, but it helps me sleep at night.

So as you may or may not know, for the first few weeks of the year, Nigeria was rocked by a series of protests sparked by the removal of government subsidies for petroleum. Overnight, the prices of fuel, food, and transportation more than doubled and the National Labour Congress called a nationwide strike which paralysed the country for nearly two weeks.

Thousands of people took to the streets across the country. Friends and acquaintances eagerly joined – one person I know camped out in front of the National Assembly for days screaming herself hoarse. For a week, I was glued to the news channels, following the many breathless rumours of impending societal collapse. Yet, something bothered me about all this agitation.

It wasn’t that it was unjustified. The government used a flimsy pretext and very shaky economic arguments to raise the cost of living on a people who mostly live in poverty while doling out millions in luxuries to themselves. It was more than time that people rise up in protest. What bothered me was not the why, but the how of it.

Maybe it was just me, but the protests smacked of populist manipulation. I watched half-literate protesters who, when asked why they were protesting, were unable to articulate their positions. That’s not surprising. People are angry – tired of a government that keeps making life more difficult for them – but because most Nigerians are poorly-educated and ill-informed, many had no idea what, specifically, they were protesting against.

And this is what the leadership of the Nigerian labour movement used to its advantage. That’s why they called off the strike after getting only minimal concessions from the government – the price is now N97 per litre instead of N65 – and securing cushy government appointments for top members.

In the meantime, the government’s official fuel price is not being uniformly enforced and prices of other commodities have yet to go down. In this country, once prices are raised, expect them to stay that way.

But what really angered me about this strike was how a certain sector of the Nigerian population – those well-heeled children of our political and social class – were all too happy to jump on the protest bandwagon. I watched in disbelief as young people driving shiny imported cars, dressed in expensive “protest chic” outfits and spent the day taking pictures of themselves with their Blackberry phones at various protest sites.

This wasn’t about anger for these people, for many of them, it was a fun day out. Protest is the “in thing” and they didn’t want to be left out. At the end of the day it wouldn’t matter if fuel ended up costing as much as N200 because they can afford it. These people live in a social media echo chamber – accessible to a small minority mostly located in the big cities of Lagos and Abuja – where they have been lulled into thinking that they’re making a difference. They aren’t. Not really.

To me, there is a profound disconnect with reality when a group of people believes that they are on the forefront of curing the nation while simultaneously benefitting from the very disease that caused all this woe in the first place.They protest vigorously against corrupt leaders while at the same time jockeying for a place at their table and happily accepting any oil money that filters down to them. It is a hypocrisy of the highest order – and they don’t even realise they are doing it.

I am convinced that there is a rot eating away at our society, destroying us from the outside in. This rot of corruption has seeped deep into our consciousness. I see it in the way we treat ourselves and each other. I see it in the way we value material wealth over merit or moral character. It’s like we live in a fishbowl that has grown so murky with grime for so long that we can’t remember what it was like when the water was clean.

And rushing out to express our anger is only one step towards fixing it. More than ethnicity and religion, Nigeria is divided between the haves and the have-nots – and these two groups don’t live in the same reality. Corruption helps to fuel this divide because it makes us selfish. We want to get as much as we can as quickly as we can when the opportunity presents itself – and damn the other guy. This means that those who have the most power to change the system have the least incentive to do so, they will happily criticise the system they are benefitting from.

That is not to say there aren’t true reformers working to effect genuine change in the country, but they are few and far between. Some civil society activists have called for continued protests, but no one has really heeded them.  Plus, there are soldiers roaming the streets of Lagos to ensure that no real move toward change takes place without a fight.

So yeah, the protests are over and we are all going back to business as usual. Tomorrow when the government does something that’s selfish, short-sighted and destructive, you can be sure that the internet activists will be there to “protest,” but whether this will really change anything is anyone’s guess.

Perhaps living in Nigeria has made me cynical, but me, I’m not going to hold my breath.

The Second Coming of African Lit

When I think of the phrase "African literature," I immediately think of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and Wole Soyinka's The Man Died. I think of Mongo Beti, Mariama Ba, Flora Nwapa, Bessie Head and Doris Lessing. They are all amazing writers whose books dealt with themes of identity and the struggle for liberation  and helped to define what in academia is known as Post-Colonial literature.

A lot of writers today are still dealing with those themes (I think of Uwem Akpan's short story collection Say You are One of Them or Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, both of which deal with the subject of war),  I work in the publishing industry and I have been privileged to see the rise of a new kind of African literature. It's exciting, it's innovative and it's completely different from what's come before. On the surface, it seems uninterested in excessive seriousness; it seems to just wanna have fun.

I hear from a lot of people who sell books for a living that Africans don't read. It's more than the dismal literacy rates in many countries, though. Because when Africans do read, they don't read African authors. Instead they prefer to read romances, thrillers and fantasy books from Western authors.

A Pacesetter novel

I don't think this is because Africans disdain their own authors, I think the truth is that Africa doesn't seem to have its own form of popular literature. In the West, there's a divide between high and low culture, between opera and ballet, and country music and wrestling. In literature that divide shows up in the separation between those who read Phillip Roth and those who read Dan Brown. What we know as African literature is dominated by high culture writers published by the West, for the West. We don't have our own romances, thrillers or fantasies anymore.

In the 60s and 70s, when the Nigerian publishing industry was at its height, there were plenty of examples of popular literature. There was the Pacesetter series, short crime thrillers and romances that were immensely popular. In the East there was "Onitsha Market Literature" and the North had a thriving Hausa literature scene. Except for the Hausa literature market, most popular ventures collapsed when the publishing industry died under the strictures of military rule.

I think that's changing. I'm seeing is the emergence of African popular literature, romances, thrillers and sci-fi that cater to the popular imagination without being weighed down by "heavy" themes and what my people like to call "grammar."It's imperfect. A lot of it is still published in the west (like Mukoma Wa Ngugi's crime thriller Nairobi Heat) or self-published (like Ekene Onu's chick-lit romance The Mrs Club) or online only (like Biram Mboob's sci-fi thriller Harabella) and hasn't yet found its way to the masses.

But as economies improve, and the middle-class continues to rise, the demand will only grow. Already, publishers are returning to the continent and they are looking for ways to make money. Just as Nollywood has revived African popular cinema, one of them will come up with a series or will discover an author who will revive popular literature. It is only a matter of time.

Trust me, I'm a professional. I know.  

Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology now available

I joined Wagadu.com last year and found it to be a genial, welcoming place filled with incredibly talented, passionate people. They gave me a lot by way of support and I wanted to give a little something back, so when I heard that their first anthology was out, I wanted to spread the word.

Griots is the first anthology dedicated to sword and soul. Sword and Soul is a genre of speculative fiction that combines African traditions, history and culture with adventure, heroic fiction and sorcery - think Conan the Barbarian set in Ancient Ghana or the Empire of Mali. The volume is edited by Charles R. Saunders, author of Imaro, widely considered to be the creator of the genre, and author Milton Davis.

It features 28 of some of the most exciting writers and artists in speculative fiction today including Minister Faust, Geoffrey Thorne, Carole McDonnell, Valjeanne Jeffers and Ronald T. Jones. Some of the artists include Natiq Jalil, Luke McDonnell, Winston Blakely, Stan Weaver, Jr., Wanye Parker and Paul Davey.

Griots made its official debut last month at Onyx Con 3, one of the largest conventions of multi-cultural speculative fiction in the US. and is available on Amazon. I can't wait to pick up a copy and I hope you will too!

Also check out the Black Science Fiction Society, great people there too.

Things I know at 30

Me at 20

I turned 30 nearly a year ago, capping off what had been a tumultuous couple of years. Despite the crying fits and occasional bouts of suicidal depression, I realized that I had learned a lot in my more than a quarter decade of life. In particular, I was inspired by this piece on RealSimple.com.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers and there are still so many things I need to learn and experience, but I wanted to share some of the insights that have come to me the hard way. Hopefully, you’ll get something out of it too.

1. Pay attention to the warning signs and don’t try to talk yourself out of a gut feeling. Trust your judgement because chances are, your spirit is trying to tell you something important.

2. You’re smarter, prettier and far more capable than you give yourself credit for. Yeah, go ahead and wear that little red mini-skirt.

3. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want; the worst they can say is no.

4. You will mess up and you will fail – sometimes epically – but it’s not your failure that will define you. It’s how you deal with it.

5. Don’t doubt your desires because they seem mundane or impossible, your dreams are always within reach.

6. You can’t change your parents, only how you react to them. Part of growing up is learning how to stop using their standards to judge your life. You’ll never feel true satisfaction until you define what success means for you.

7. Don’t let the fear of being single keep you in a relationship that isn’t working (or isn’t going to work). Heartbreak is painful, but it won’t kill you.

8. Stop comparing yourself to others or to the imagined ideal in your head. The quest for perfection can drive you for a while, but sooner or later you’re going to have to find your motivation within yourself.

9. Happiness isn’t something that will come once you’ve ticked all the boxes. It’s a choice you have to make every day. Like working out, you have to make the effort and commit to it.

10. Karma is one seriously mean bitch. She never forgets and in this life or the next she’ll make you pay. So stay on her good side.

11. You’ll be treated with the respect you command, not the respect you demand. So when appropriate, dress like a grownup, speak articulately, stand up straight and always look at the people you're talking to.

12. For most of us, the struggle to truly know ourselves is lifelong, but rest assured that you know more about your desires, your limits and your motivations than you did 10 years ago.

13. You know when he’s lying. It’s not logical, it’s not rational, but you know. What you choose to do with that knowledge is up to you.

14. Don’t be afraid to feel your emotions fully and deeply. Be aware of them at all times and work to head off bad moods as they begin. You're emotions are far more powerful than you think and feeling good about yourself is the essence of true success.

15. Take every opportunity to travel. It’ll be the one thing that you truly regret when you look back.

16. Anything that wearies your spirit is never right - that goes for jobs or people, and even places. Life is too short to settle for or put up with anything that drains you of your joy.

17. Get it done. Every day you put off doing what you need to do out of fear is another day in your fading youth that you will never get back.

18. Sex can be many things: damaging or liberating, exhilarating or dull, comforting or experimental, but it is never, ever casual.


How about you? What advice would you give your 20-year-old self? What do you wish you had known 20 years ago that you know now? Please don’t hesitate to add your piece of advice.