Foday Mannah is a British-Sierra Leonean writer and educator based in Scotland. Raised in Sierra Leone, he studied English Literature at Fourah Bay College and later earned advanced degrees in conflict and creative writing in the UK. His debut novel, The Search for Othella Savage, won the 2022 Mo Siewcharran Prize. His fiction has been recognized by the Bristol Prize, Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and others, and published in Wasafiri, Doek, and others.
The following interview took place via zoom between Mannah and Poda-Poda Stories’ associate editor, Charmaine Denison-George. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Charmaine: Welcome, Foday. I’ve been looking forward to this call with you.
Foday: Thanks for having me, Charmaine.
Charmaine: When did you first realize that writing was something you needed or wanted to do?
Foday: I think in high school. I went to Bo School in Sierra Leone. In form six, we had a current affairs club that also had a newspaper. We called ourselves the Satellite Newspaper. By then, because the country was going through a civil war, we focused on the activities of the war from the perspective of us students. So, my first entry into writing would be nonfiction, whereby I was the editor of the newspaper articles we wrote. I also had this strong tradition of reading quite a lot and later, when I became a teacher, I was exposed to a vast array of literature, so I ended up more or less reading and writing.
Charmaine: Every writer has a unique preoccupation with certain themes or tropes or arguments. What are these for you? Which ones have you explored in your already existing work and which ones do you hope to explore further?
Foday: I think it's power, definitely power. I’ve tried to examine the representation of power, both the domestic and political, especially in our societies. You would know this yourself, Charmaine, that as a child growing up in Sierra Leone, you hardly have a voice. Whatever the adults say is gospel. I’ve always been intrigued how that more or less translates to the political sphere. When I was a young man in Bo town, I remember that a government minister once arrived five minutes into a football match. I remember him walking in and the stadium with thousands of people went quiet. Then the Chief ran towards the referee saying, “stop the game, stop the game.” So, we restarted the game just because the minister had come. It was things like that that always got me thinking about how power operates.
Also, if you live in a society like Sierra Leone where almost everybody believes in Christianity or Islam, if you can harness that power and convince people that you are a proxy, that translates into astronomical power. And I think a lot of the times women are at the center of it, because women who don’t have a husband or children for example are seen as being defective, and sold remedies that they need to go to church and get prayers so they can get pregnant. So even though religion is at the center of my novel, and even though it's a crime novel, my obsession or my main focus is power, and how power can get manipulated both in domestic situations and political situations.
Charmaine: Who are the writers—African, diasporic, or otherwise that have informed your craft?
Foday: Oh, that's a difficult one. Charles Dickens had a big impact on me. I remember reading Great Expectations when I was in form four in Bo School. I say Charles Dickens also primarily because his novels focused on the industrial revolution with themes like poverty and deprivation and abuse of children.
From an African perspective, it has to be Chinua Achebe. He was massive with books like Chike and the River, Arrow of God, and No Longer at Ease. And moving on to modern times, I would say Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I think she's phenomenal for her fiction and nonfiction (which I teach in my classes). I teach in a Scottish high school with predominantly white kids and it's interesting exposing them to her brilliant text titled, We Should All Be Feminists for example.
Charmaine: Do you write with a specific audience in mind or does it come to you as you write?
Foday: My default position has always been Africa. I was born in London and went to Sierra Leone when I was six. I went to school there and then university before returning to the U.K. So, I think with that in mind, a lot of my context, a lot of my background has to be more or less Sierra Leonean. Other pieces I write look at the immigrant experience, about us Africans in the diaspora and how that translates.
There’s an activity I do with my students called Fantastic Tales whereby I get them to pretend they're animals for example, and so write a creative piece from that perspective. I'll say you could even write this from the perspective of a dog. For an European or American dog, you write about going to the vet or being taken for a walk, but those things cannot apply for an African dog, because an average African dog doesn’t go to the vet and nobody takes it for a walk. They'd go over their own walk. So I think with writing about humans and even things or ideas like feminism, the context alters depending on where the person is.
Charmaine: You’re active in writing short fiction and recently, long-form with your novel—what’s the main challenge for you in switching between the two formats?
Foday: Well, I think short stories are fascinating, Charmaine, in the sense that most of them require quite a specific skill where you have to work within a word count. They also give you an opportunity to produce something that you could view holistically as an achievement. It's almost like a rapper’s mix tape which can serve as a precursor to their main album. I have that same perspective with writing in the sense that short stories give you a chance to dip your toe into the writing and put yourself out there. Short stories, I think, are a very good way to get validation.
And then the correlation between short stories and novels is that a lot of the times, my short stories are actually sections from my novel even though quite a few are stand-alone pieces. While editing a whole novel for example, you remove bits from it but you can't throw it away, so that becomes a short story of its own. So that's more or less what I tend to do.
Charmaine: Have you ever struggled with the idea of genre? I know some diasporic African writers are sometimes peeved by the classification that their texts receive, especially as a work of fiction can bleed into so many different things. Do you believe in classifying texts? And if so, what should the first order of classification be? Is it where the author is from or genre?
Foday: I think there's a kind of snobbery at times with these issues. I think that the books that win the big prizes tend to be termed literary fiction and I find that's really quite problematic in the sense that I don't think genres are mutually exclusive. Frederick Forsyth, for example, whose phenomenal spy novels I grew up reading, never got nominated for the Booker Prize. He wrote The Day of the Jackal, which is about a secret assassin who wants to assassinate the president of France because he has granted independence to Algeria. That's a rich, political topic which won't get recognition because it's labeled a ‘spy’ novel.
I think increasingly, I am quite happy that the lines of genre appear to be becoming a bit more blurred. Black Panther is another brilliant example, where on the surface, it is like a big Marvel movie, but when you look at it, it's deeply political. Wakanda, this secret African country with all this technology, is a brilliant metaphor about race and blackness. It was quite interesting to see it nominated for best movie at the Oscars because normally, a superhero movie might not get those accolades, but at least the academy realizing that genres are not mutually exclusive is good. And I'm a bit afraid of myself, the very fact that I've written something that's termed crime fiction because where we come from Charmaine, it's automatically seen with suspicion. And I get that a lot from my friends who say, okay, so you've written this and what does it mean? If I, for example, had written about the Sierra Leonean civil war or political corruption, they’d easily understand but crime, they don't know how to take that seriously.
Charmaine: What was the order in which your novel, Othella Savage, revealed itself to you? Did you first aim to write into the genre of crime fiction or did the characters reveal themselves to you first? How was the idea born?
Foday: An opportunity came for a short story competition, and they wanted crime fiction. That's when I thought about a horrible case in Scotland about a nurse in December 2008, who was abducted in the winter and locked in the boot of a car. I also remember watching a documentary over a decade ago about rinsers and it was about these young girls who would find older men who could lavish money on them. So more or less, the reasoning of the story was the rinsers documentary, the woman in the boot and the whole idea of religion which I merged.
Charmaine: I wanted to talk about the idea of names and naming in your work. I’d read the story you published in Afritondo where the protagonist’s name is Amadu Palaver and immediately, I knew he was going to be a problematic character and then, of course, there's Othella, Ronald Ranka and others in The Search for Othella Savage. What’s the effect of those names and specifically, how do you use it in your writing?
Foday: I think names can be hugely symbolic, and a kind of way to represent something. For example, Amadu Palaver is a real person. That’s actually what people called him behind his back because nobody dared to say it to his face. He was a very violent and aggressive man who was always fighting people.
With ‘Othella’, I just liked the female version of Othello. If you read Othello, it's more or less a black man in a white society. So, I quite liked that correlation that these women in the story are black women in a white society. With the other names like ‘Ranka’, you would know in Sierra Leone that the word suggests that he is not what he seems, and that he has a proclivity for corruption. There’s also ‘Elijah Foot Patrol’ who doesn't drive, also inspired by a similar name from the African community here… and of course there’s a jolly and happy fellow so his nickname is Santa.
Charmaine: What was publication day like?
Foday: You’re a writer yourself, Charmaine. You just have no idea how things are going to be received. Seeing a review in The Guardian was unbelievable because I was in the same article as Stephen King. People have also been ever so supportive, buying the book and even the students and teachers at school ask me to sign it, saying do you mind? And I thought, do I mind? Of course I’ll sign it!
And like I always say, with writing, a lot of the time you exist on the margins, but then something finally switches to the limelight, and it opens so many doors. It’s also an industry where you don’t see many people who look like us. Even recently in Edinburgh, Scotland, you get to a literary event with hundreds of people but maybe only one black person. It's a fascinating dynamic.
Charmaine: So, I read elsewhere that this novel was ten years in the making. What do you now know ten years on about the process of writing a book from start to completion? What has this new aspect of authorship taught you?
Foday: I think I’ve learnt that you have to persevere. I don’t think you should have this attitude that people owe you something. You cannot have a chip on your shoulder. I, for example, applied to the University of Glasgow to do a Creative Writing degree and I was rejected so I applied somewhere else, and I got accepted. During that course, they paired us with people and there was someone who, when we produced our first piece, the lecturer found a problem with it. The person ended up quitting because of the feedback. So, my advice will be that you need to try hard, and it has to be something you enjoy.
In terms of writing a book, it's a long, hard process. I finished the degree in 2014, I didn’t get shortlisted till 2019; didn't win the competition till 2022 and then I finally got published in 2025. These are massive gaps of time. So, it's not easy at all. You need to take your time and see where it takes you.
Charmaine: Now that The Search for Othella Savage is out in the world, what conversations do you hope it sparks?
Foday: Well, I don't think the themes are revolutionary but themes like the abuse of women or the insidious nature of religion would be good ones for discussion.
For religion, I have nothing against religion. I think in society, religion can become this soft, easy target to attack, but I also think that religion can be tied to so much good in the world like education. Some of the best schools, globally, are religiously founded. Like in Freetown, some of the best schools like St. Joseph’s Convent, The Annie Walsh Memorial School, The Sierra Leone Grammar School, these are all Catholic or Christian schools. So, I do not subscribe to the view that religion is more or less a dark thing. I however believe that human beings sometimes take the reverence we ascribe to religion to dark places.
For example, when my stepmother visited Scotland years ago, she refused to wear trousers or long johns even though she was cold. She said her pastor back home said women should not wear trousers. When we took her to church, and we asked her how she found the service, she said, well the service was okay but the only problem was that the woman Pastor was wearing a trouser suit. Similarly, my sister died at 21 of a serious strain of malaria because family members took her to church instead of a hospital till it was much too late. So, I think we need to challenge ourselves and we need to ask questions. We need to question our politicians, we need to question our religious leaders, we need to question our parents.
Charmaine: What do budding Sierra Leonean and African writers need to know about the craft of writing?
Foday: We should try not to be restricted by genre. I think a lot of our conversations are still mired in the past: Achebe and Ngugi and Beti. And there’s nothing wrong with that; these are phenomenal writers, but some of these books were written in the '60s and we need to move it forward. We also have to move away from this concept that it's all about age whereby older writers resist reading works by younger writers. I think that's ridiculous. I mean, I've got here Nightcrawling written by Leila Mottley which was long listed for the Booker Prize. I think she was like 20 when she wrote it, but good literature is good literature. It can come from anywhere, and we need to look beyond age. It cannot also be that we always write about big things like slavery and immigration and Windrush. There is nothing wrong with these things, but we can expand them into other spheres.
Our writers also need to look at other art forms like movies. The movie, Get Out, for example is a horror movie with a brilliant message about race in America. As, writers and creatives, we need to expand our sphere in terms of themes but also in terms of genre.
If you think about the competition I won, it was specifically for ethnic minority people because the thinking is that ethnic minorities do not write crime. The following year, the same competition was for children's books and then fantasy books. So, my advice would be more or less that we need to open it up. Let's write crime, let's write fantasy, let's write magical realism. And there are so many stories. And we as a people know so much about magic realism like, mami water, devils and the supernatural. We have this in a folklore, so why should we not tap into them?
Charmaine: Foday, thank you so much. It's my wish that you continue this path not only for personal fulfillment, but also to put Sierra Leone on the map with your writing.
Foday: Thank you, Charmaine. It's been a pleasure. That Poda-Poda is a magazine that is our own (Sierra Leonean) is absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much.
Purchase a copy of The Search for Othella Savage here: https://www.quercusbooks.co.uk/titles/foday-mannah/the-search-for-othella-savage/9781529437065/#
