Tapping into a continent's stories with PenAfrica: Hayat Mohammed
For Ethiopian sophomore Hayat Mohammed, the idea of an organization that would empower young writers and promote African story-telling first began as a ...
May 9, 2015
For Ethiopian sophomore Hayat Mohammed, the idea of an organization that would empower young writers and promote African story-telling first began as a high school class project with friends. It soon expanded into an international initiative, one that Mohammed continues supporting while at NYU Abu Dhabi. In an interview with The Gazelle, Mohammed spoke about where she sees PenAfrica heading, her belief in the power of story-telling and how celebrating differences can shine through in words.
The Gazelle: Can you tell me a bit about PenAfrica, what is it?
Mohammed: Our mission and vision has changed quite a few times, so I’ll give you what I feel like it is right now. PenAfrica is an organization that aims to promote storytelling. What we do is find different platforms for people to tell their stories; our end goal is to increase people’s knowledge and awareness of the African continent — not just outside the continent, but also for people within Africa. And, in the process, hopefully change the negative perceptions and promote the positive aspects of the continent.
How do you do that? Through children’s books?
We have a number of projects that we’ve planned, but currently we are just focusing on the children’s books. We target children between ages 8 and 11 and so we created the Ekari book series. Ekari is an 8-year-old Malawi girl, who travels across the African continent with her parents, her brother and her grandma. She meets new people and discovers new cultures in the process.
We thought, “What is the best way to change perceptions and whose perceptions do we need to change?” Children — they are at the youngest stage of their lives and so they haven’t yet formed these stereotypes just yet. So we targeted them and hope to teach them new things about the continent aside from what they see in the media.
What sort of things specifically are you trying to teach them?
In the books, we include some languages — basic words — and different practices, such as food, music and other practices that are strongly identified with a specific country.
So cultural heritage?
Yeah. And we also include aspects of everyday life, how people live in each country.
So it’s something that a child reading it will be able to identify with?
As you follow Ekari, you form a relationship with her. She goes to the market, for example, and she does all these things and meets all these people and you learn about that as you go. So it’s not a guideline of, “In this culture, they do this,” but it’s more to show a certain experience in order for children to learn through that experience.
What countries does Ekari go to? Where does she start and where does she end up?
Ekari is Malawian, so the first book is her leaving Malawi. We have aspects of her life there, such as talking to fishermen in Malawi for example, and woodcarving, food, clothing, celebrations — those are the types of things that she does in the first book. We’re thinking about where to go next. She might go to Egypt or to Nigeria, any place.
So one book has been published and is available, right?
Yes. We printed out the first book last year for a conference. It wasn’t officially for sale, because it did not have any ISBN code or anything, so we couldn’t sell it in bookstores. But now we have an official ISBN code so we are allowed to distribute and sell it.
Where are you selling it, what sort of places?
Right now, we are targeting university libraries and places that are easy to network. We’ve talked to a lot of our friends who are in different universities and asked them to reach out to any close bookstores and sell it there. We also have talked to schools within the African continent to see how we can distribute it to them. We’re doing online distribution as well, so you can get a PDF. Hopefully it will be on Amazon soon.
Where did the idea come from? Was it you who thought up the project?
I attended the African Leadership Academy, which is a boarding school in South Africa, about two years ago. They have a very strong focus on entrepreneurial leadership and one of the projects that we had for a class was to think of a big idea. My passions were literature and poetry, so I wanted to do something around that. They grouped us with people who share our passions and they said, “Develop a prototype of something.” I teamed up with two people — Alexia Paradzai from Zimbabwe and Priscilla Semphere from Malawi, they are ALA students from my boarding school. We started talking about what kind of prototype we could make. It wasn’t supposed to be a real plan, though, it was just a practice for class.
We really got into the details of the project and we created our prototype with the goal of actually implementing it in the future. We presented it and our teachers encouraged us to go forward with it. From then on, it became an actual, real idea that we were working on.
And you started realizing it when you got to university?
At the end of my boarding school experience, we had started doing some work around writing the first book and having it edited by some of our teachers on campus. And then we had the first copy ready for printing. After I came to university, my co-founder participated in conferences during her gap year and started promoting it. Since then, we have just kept building the foundation.
Do you do the writing? Who does the illustrations?
For our first book, my co-founder Priscilla wrote the book and we went through an editing process together, with some professors who had children and a lot of experience also helping us. The illustration was done by Scott Baldwin — he used to work in Dubai and was a close friend of one of our teachers. We really capitalized on the people that we knew and the people that they knew. It was collaboration and I was mostly active on the editing side of it.
Where do you see the project going now and in the coming years?
We have big ideas for PenAfrica. I think the Ekari book project will be something consistent that will continue for a long time. It requires collaboration with people from every country that we write about and it’s going to require a lot of marketing. But also, in addition to that project, we would like to reach out to a larger population and a larger demographic.
In the future, I see PenAfrica as having its own publishing house to help young African writers publish their work. There are some, but really not a lot, of organizations that do that and we want to contribute to the existing work being done. I see it as having a really influential role in inspiring young people to write more and share their stories more.
Are you working on it this summer?
I’m always working on PenAfrica. It is difficult because you have to balance your time between university and extracurriculars and the project. Also, we all live in different locations. It’s always hard to find the right time, and the time zones are another issue, but we do our best. When we do get the chance to find ourselves in the same place, we do as much work as we can.
Do you know roughly when the second book will be finalized?
We’re hoping to have a manuscript done by January, but that will depend also on our illustrators. We’re going to be looking for other illustrators and also collaborating with someone from the country that we are going to be talking about.
Last question: do you have any standout memories or moments from working on this project that spurs you forward?
A couple of weeks back, I did a TEDx talk at NYUAD and after the talk was complete, we were having a networking session where we were talking to people about our ideas. These two little girls came up to me and they introduced themselves. They are from India, the daughters of a professor on campus. They told me how they loved the idea and that they really wanted to read Ekari. I happened to have a copy of the book with me and I gave it to them.
They flipped through it right away, it’s very easy to read, and they said, “Can we get more? When are you going to publish again?” That was such a bright moment for me. It just made it so much more real for me when I saw the project in practice — the book in the hands of children, those who we are aiming for, and they like it. I really appreciated that.
Clare Hennig is features editor. Email her at feedback@gzl.me.
related
trending