If you referred to Maimouna Jallow as a child of Africa, indeed a child of the world, you wouldn’t be too far off the mark. Born in Spain to a Gambian father and a Spanish mother, she moved back to her father’s homeland, then to a neighbourhood known as Forever in Lome, Togo before leaving hurriedly at the height of a violent, but botched coup against General Gnassingbe Eyadema’s government – all before she was 13 years old.
From Lome, her family settled in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana where the Pan-Africanist leader’s policies had a direct effect on Ms Jallow’s life, and her life’s work.
“He [Nkrumah] was a big proponent of free education for all, so [my father] got a scholarship to study in Ghana,” Ms Jallow reminisces, speaking from the outskirts of Barcelona where she was born.
After a stint working for the BBC World Service in Sao Tome and Principe, a tiny island in the Gulf of Guinea, Ms Jallow found herself in Kenya. She expected to stay for three years but like many before her, bitten by the Kenyan bug, ended up calling Kenya home for more than a decade.
“The minute you leave the city, you see the Africa of our dreams, the Africa portrayed by our parents,” Ms Jallow talks of her feeling at home everywhere on the African continent, more so in rural Africa.
Given a chance, she would like to spend some time in The Gambia, where her late father, one of 21 siblings rests and where a great affinity for the storytelling style of the griot is still prevalent to this day.
For the love of the story
“One of the things I used to do a lot, I would underline passages that I really liked as I read any books,” Ms Jallow says of her love for reading and writing from a tender age. She would stick the pen-written proverbs she liked on her walls.
“You know, a lot of people say they discovered that they are black or mixed-race when they get to Europe. And it's true, the gaze shifts!” Ms Jallow says of her identity.
In England where she came into her own, she recalls reading a poem from the African American civil rights activist and poet Langston Hughes.
The line, Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair, from the poem Mother to Son. Ms Jallow remembers, “I just found it so beautiful that it prompted me to try and also find my own voice in writing.”
A thousand miles from home, she rediscovered the beauty of African writing. As a child, her father had an extensive library but she’d just gloss over the texts, touch the embossed chains on the hard-cover of her father’s copy of Alex Haley’s Roots. In the narrow hallways of a library in Oxford, Ms Jallow fell in love all over again with Achebe and with Ngugi.
The Correspondent
Ms Jallow went into journalism, working for the BBC. “I learnt more about my continent than I'd ever had an opportunity to learn before, at least in terms of news and current affairs,” she says of her time at the British broadcaster.
“After a while, I started feeling like, ‘this idea that as a journalist, you have to be so independent... you have to be neutral,’ whatever that word means. But the more I did journalistic reports, [the more] I missed creative writing and the ability to take a stance on something.”
More and more, she started pulling away from the reporting part of Africa’s stories and, in her words, started on a trajectory that felt more meaningful, the telling of African stories, stories about women, children, our values, history and heroes.
Eventually, Ms Jallow left the newsroom but not before penning a scathing article on the then Gambian dictator, Yahya Jammeh, earning herself persona-non-grata status for over a decade in a place she was supposed to call home. She has since been able to visit since Jammeh’s fall.
Seeking folk-tales
When she became a mother in the late 2000, Ms Jallow’s quest to look for African stories intensified. “I knew that I wanted to make sure my son had access to African stories. I've always known at the back of my mind that they're not just stories, that there are important values that are transmitted through these stories,” she says of her quest.
Only once she’d started did she realise that the stories weren’t as available as she thought – being that most were handed down orally through generations.
Ms Jallow got a grant to ‘re-imagine African folktales’ as some ideas in some stories had been overtaken by time, as well as the need to update the ubiquitous narrative of ‘respecting your elders.’ Still, Ms Jallow emphasises, “I do think that the structure of folktales, the use of proverbs, physical telling, the use of riddles and call and response, is something that's definitely worth preserving.” She further says of this period, “That was the first time that I was very directly merging creative writing, fictional storytelling with my politics and with real life events.”
Her story for that anthology was inspired by the tragic demise of Eric Garner, a policeman’s knee on his neck – her homage to him.
Positively African
Asked to relate the fearlessness of the current crop of youth in Africa with the contemporary stories Africans are telling, Ms Jallow chuckles, jokes about taking credit for it and then takes on a serious tone.
“I think of Too Early for Birds,” she says of the theatrically staged historical plays by Kenyan thespian Ngartia, “how they sold out show after show because Kenyans were seeing themselves represented on stage by Kenyans, telling Kenyan stories about real Kenyan people that they are not necessarily learning about in the school books. That gives you a tremendous power and a sense of pride and identity!”
Back to Barcelona
Three or so years ago, Ms Jallow left the shores of Africa for her childhood home in Barcelona, to which she fondly refers to as ushago, (upcountry).
She explained her reasons for leaving, “Economically Nairobi is a very expensive city... Covid-19 happened and I realised I am so far from my family. I wanted to close the gap. I haven't lived with my mother since I was 16 years old and I wanted to reconnect with her.
“A very critical one for me is that my son was 14. I said I cannot be serious about how I want this world to be, allowing my child to grow up in this bubble of privilege, which is a fallacy because as his mom, I couldn’t afford it anymore. At age 14, I said, this is when they become aware.
“And so I came here and I put him in the state school. He walks to school or takes the bicycle now. We live in a village, he can go anywhere. And I think for me, it was very important to be able to give him that. I didn't know how to do that in Kenya.”
