I was asked to do a reading as part of the London Literary Festival at the Wasafiri Prize Ceremony. I read an excerpt from my short story, Just a Body Part, set in Kampala in 2005, during the days when The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler was banned by the government for being pornographic.
My story is also a monologue and I explore what it means to endure every day acts of violence in the home, and what minute acts of resistance could mean.
The reading took place at London’s Royal Festival Hall on Saturday, 31st October. My story is published in Edition 125 of Wasafiri.
Edited by Vamika Sinha, Wasafiri 125 explores ‘Living in the Melancholony’. The term ‘melancholony’ is used by artist Abdul Halik Azeez to describe a place that ‘constructs itself for and through the eyes of the white westerner’. This issue applies the term, more broadly, to not only the structures, but the affect, of living under a colonial, racial capitalist gaze and legacy.
Read a range of writing from across the African continent (from Rwanda to Uganda, Botswana to Nigeria, and beyond); interviews with prizewinning writers on how literary and political practices intersect; and our usual mix of poetry, reviews, fiction, life writing, and articles spanning a variety of regions and subjects: including love and language across caste barriers, the ethics of erasure, spectating, living, and writing during genocide, and much more. We also present here the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize-winning pieces.