An African City is the most non stereotypical portrayal of African women I have seen in a long time. Are these characters representative of all urban African women? certainly not, but they do cover a large demographic of them who are not often shown in mass culture. As I mentioned in another post, African women are diverse, our differences includes culture, class, education, and exposure. One size does not fit all, some African women are rich and some are poor, some are educated and some are illiterates, some are autonomous and some are not, some are like Ifemelu and some are like Kosi (you know what I mean if you’ve read Americanah).…

For a long time, I’ve tried to stay clear of the subject of racism because it seems very typical for a black writer to write about race. For a black person, everything seems to be centered around that one subject. We can’t seem to live a life free from the subject of race. So I try to not fall into that stereotype of black writers writing about race, but I’m finding that it’s impossible not to talk about race, especially when racism is just so glaring. The mere fact that I’ll be identified as a “black writer” not “a writer” already puts me in a box that places my work…

We are artists, we paint pictures of gold and pearl laid streets. We are writers with the most descriptive and convincing words of persuasion. We are grout in the making, we tell stories of a place we only wished was as we had imagined. But instead, we have a world upon which reality prevails, waking us from that beautiful trance and robbing us of that dream we would so love to hold on to. And so we hate reality, we hate the dirty streets with its dust and awful stench, we hate the subways, the endless rides on the trains with the loud chatters of people who behave just like…

It appears that some folks did not know Beyoncé was black until she sang “Formation” (funny huh?). I thought she has always been black, but apparently, it takes more than having a dark skin or being born to a parent of African descent to be black. So some folks believe Beyoncé is appropriating blackness. Now the question is what qualifies as being black? Black is a term used to describe a person of African descent, black is a label by which society ostracize a particular group of people, but at the same time, black is a symbol of social justice and the fight for racial equality. Being black in the…