"Storytelling is resistance"-Hickmatu Leigh on the power of visual storytelling

Hickamatu Leigh is an artist photographer, storyteller, and young feminist activist from Sierra Leone. Known for her impactful photography and filmmaking focussed on the lives and experiences of Sierra Leonean girls and women, her award-winning work includes honours from the Women Deliver Arts and Film Festival 2023, and the SDG Vanguard Award in 2024 from the UN Foundation. 

Her film, Gboroka, which explores Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), has been selected for the African Film Festival in New York. Ahead of the screening, Leigh shares the inspiration behind the film and why African women’s stories are important.

Poda-Poda Stories: Let’s start with your journey with photography as your language. How did you choose photography as a medium, and what has that journey been like? 

Hickmatu Leigh: I don’t think I chose photography,photography chose me. 

For a long time, I lived in silence. Growing up, I began to realize how much our environment shapes who we become. In my community, we were taught that the things that happened to us especially as girls were normal. That to be quiet was to be respectful. That to question tradition or religion meant you were rebellious, ungrateful, or even sinful. But deep down, I kept asking: what about us? What about how we feel? What about our voices? 

I was angry. I wanted to stand out. I wanted more. 

After graduating with a degree in public health, I struggled to find work. I was home, idle, reflecting a lot and that’s when it hit me. I had always loved taking pictures. It brought me peace. It made me feel seen, like I was actually good at something. Friends and family would tell me, “You’re really good at this,” and for once, I decided to believe them. 

Photography became my language during a time I couldn’t speak. I was in a dark place, feeling invisible and not enough. But through the lens, I began to reclaim my worth. I started to see the power of visual storytelling especially in a country where so many stories about women like me go untold. 

Over time, photography transformed from a safe space into my purpose. It took me into rooms with UNICEF, WHO, Purposeful, winning awards and having international exhibitions. More importantly, it led me to myself. Through photography, I have healed. And now, as a new mother, it feels even more sacred. It’s how I speak to my child, my ancestors, and the world. It is how I remain visible, rooted, and free. 

Poda-Poda: What is your creative process like as an artist working in visual storytelling?

Leigh: My creative process is deeply spiritual. It often begins with a feeling sometimes from a story I’ve lived, or heard, or imagined. It could be sparked by a conversation, a sound, or even a single image. But once the spark comes, I sit with it. I reflect. I pray. I ask myself: What truth are we trying to honor here? 

I write. I dream. I talk to the people whose stories I want to tell. I let their energy guide me. 

For me, visual storytelling isn’t just about aesthetics. It is about emotion, legacy, and truth. I let intuition lead the way. Whether I’m documenting girls’ voices or exploring the sacredness of womanhood, I always aim to show the beauty in the struggle. My images are often black and white because I want people to focus on the emotion, the texture and the story.

My photography is a conversation that speaks without shouting, one that honors identity, culture, and resilience. Through veils, masks, and raw portraiture, I try to reveal what has been hidden. My work is my voice. It is my resistance and my offering.

Poda-Poda: That’s a good segue into the next question, which is about your film, Gboroka. I love that your work focuses primarily on Sierra Leonean women and this movie tackles a very sensitive and complex topic in Sierra Leone. How were you able to handle that sensitivity and drive the discussion forward about FGM in your film? 

Leigh: Gboroka is deeply personal. It is my story—our story. 

In Sierra Leone, topics like FGM are often surrounded by silence and shame. But I know firsthand how powerful visual storytelling can be, and I knew this was a story that needed to be told. Not with blame, but with honesty. Not to condemn our culture, but to show all of it the beauty, the pain, the complexity. 

As a team through AWATS (African Women and Their Stories), we approached it with a lot of care. We didn’t want to sensationalize the topic, we wanted to humanize. We centered the voices of women and girls. We listened. We felt. We allowed their truths to guide the narrative. Gboroka is a conversation starter. It’s powerful, it’s triggering, but it’s necessary.

The goal was never just to make a film, it was to open space. Space to feel. Space to talk. Space to imagine a different future for our daughters. 

We have screened Gboroka in a few places so far and had two international film selections. Every time, it stirred something deep. We’ve now launched our impact campaign and are actively taking the film to schools and communities to continue the conversation and inspire change. That’s the power of art it reaches where words can’t always go. 

A still from the film Gboroka, which explores FGM.

Poda-Poda: What was the writing process like when you were working on the film, especially from the perspective of merging the visual with narrative? 

Leigh: When I was writing Gboroka, there were moments I genuinely felt afraid. I remember sharing the idea with my mom and my aunt and their response was, “This na society secret, dem nor dey pull am na doe.” That moment hit me hard. It reminded me just how deep and sacred this silence is. But it also fueled the urgency. There was a strong will in me to tell this story from my own perspective from the stories the women before me whispered, the things I had seen, felt, carried. I wanted it to be raw. I wanted it to be honest. 

We wrote Gboroka from the heart. We didn’t sit down to create a script that explains everything. We sat in silence. We sat with the question of what it means when a girl can’t speak her truth, when she screams inwardly and is told to call it tradition. We didn’t want to preach. We wanted people to feel. 

Because I’m a photographer first, I approached every scene like a still image. I visualized pain, hope, and resistance in motionless frames. And that’s why Gboroka has no dialogue intentionally. We wanted viewers to interpret it on their own terms, to confront their emotions, their discomfort, their memories. Every frame was deliberate carrying weight, grief, silence, but also beauty. 

We wanted to show the richness of our culture, the rhythm, the colors, the rituals but also the parts we’re not allowed to talk about. The wounds hidden behind smiles. So Gboroka isn’t just a film. It’s a question. A mirror. And I’m proud we dared to make it.

Poda-Poda: What are you hoping will be the outcome of Gboroka when people watch it? 

Leigh: I hope Gboroka lingers. 

I hope it opens doors for conversations we’ve been too afraid to have. I hope it helps girls feel seen. I hope it challenges parents to reflect, and community leaders to protect. I hope decision-makers move from silence to action. 

But above all, I hope it births empathy. Real change happens when people feel something deeply. Data doesn’t always shift hearts, but stories do. If Gboroka helps even one person see things differently, it has done its job. 

Poda-Poda: Choosing a creative career in Sierra Leone, as you may know, is not an easy path to forge, especially as a woman. What has helped you in your journey, and what advice would you give to budding filmmakers? 

Leigh: It hasn’t been easy. Some days, it still feels like I’m fighting just to be heard. But what keeps me grounded is my why. 

I remind myself constantly of my purpose for the girl I once was who needed to see someone like me doing this work. I lean on my sisterhood, my partner, and my faith. And now, as a mother, I carry a new kind of fire. Everything I create now is also a message to my child. A reminder that their mother tried to shift something. 

To young filmmakers, especially women in Sierra Leone: your voice is enough. You don’t need permission to create. Start small. Start honest. Build your tribe. Protect your vision, and don’t be afraid to feel deeply. 

Storytelling is resistance. It is love. It is a way of remembering and a way of dreaming. The world needs your voice, don't be afraid to use it.

Gboroka will be screening at the New York African Film Festival in May.

Oluwaseun Babalola on Black Identity and the power of film.

Oluwaseun Babalola is an award-winning director, Emmy-nominated producer, exhibited photographer, DOC NYC 40 Under 40 Honoree and the founder/executive director of the organization, KOSINIMA, Inc, a nonprofit that provides grant funding for African and African diasporic filmmakers. Currently, Oluwaseun is on a festival run as writer/director on her short narrative film, Fighting Giants, filmed in Sierra Leone. The story is about a mother and daughter confronting their relationship with grief during a surreal visit back to Freetown, Sierra Leone. In this interview, Babalola talks about her work as a filmmaker, why she wrote Fighting Giants, and the importance of funding African films.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ngozi: The first time I came across your work was through the series ṢOJU where you were documenting the lives of young people around Africa. How did you get into documentary film and why did you start ṢOJU? 

Babalola: I just naturally had an interest and a passion for documentary filmmaking because I liked finding out about people's stories. I was always filming things from a young age. But in terms of ṢOJU–which was three seasons of a digital documentary series where I was going around Africa and the diaspora, focusing on youth culture and how we see ourselves– that started because I had the idea for years before I actually did something about it. Growing up in Brooklyn, outside of my home, there wasn’t a strong presence of being African because Brooklyn is very Caribbean and African-American. In addition, in media representation, there also weren’t African experiences that closely reflected mine. So I had the richness of an African home, but then when I turned on the TV, Africa was the butt of a joke or depicted as this scary place.

And so with that natural progression of loving storytelling, I thought, let me travel to Africa and show my community. It started off as trying to show a different form of Africa, but then it evolved into a series about how we actually see each other as Africans. 

Ngozi: You've been a documentary filmmaker for many years. But then when it came to sharing a story that was really personal, you decided to choose narrative film. Your short film, Fighting Giants, is about a mother and daughter’s relationship with grief during a surreal visit back to Freetown, Sierra Leone.Why did you use narrative film to tell the story?

Babalola: I could have made a documentary film but that wouldn't have properly allowed me to show the past from the standpoint of emotion. If it was a documentary, I would've had to look at the past in a historical context and maybe present facts and resources in a way where it kind of removes how I was impacted on a personal level. Whereas with narrative, I could reenact the story because the story is a hundred percent true. I didn't make up anything that happened. 

I could have depicted in a way where I'm telling this real life thing, but I can add elements that more invoke how the real events impacted the people who were involved, whether that be with surrealism, whether that be with camera angles or editing music and it let me experiment a little bit more with retelling something that happened as opposed to having to fixate on facts in a documentary. Film gave more artistic expression and creative freedom.

Ngozi: There’s a scene too in the film that I really liked. The mom and her daughter are crossing this waterway at River Number Two Beach, and the mom is really hesitant. Her daughter coaxes her on and they eventually reach the other side of the beach. And then this random guy shows up and starts yelling at them that they can’t be there. And it stood out to me for several reasons. Firstly, that is something that has happened to me before actually at one of the beaches. But I think it also highlights other issues in our society. Why did you put that scene in? 

Babalola: Thank you so much for saying that because, and I love how every Sierra Leonean I’ve shown it to likes that part, because it’s realistic!

It made sense for me to put that scene in, not only because it actually happened, but because I think it really shows how these characters are having this moment where it may or may not be a breakthrough. And when they finally do, they can't even get a second to have a peaceful moment because Sierra Leone just breaks that calm and that man on the beach is a personification of …it always has to be something!

That's what the mother and daughter kept coming across the entire film. Even when they tried to make progress, there was always something in their way. And so it was really important for me to have that moment where they could be close to a happy ending, but once again there's something in the way of that. 

Ngozi: You wrote an op-ed where you wrote about the grueling process of trying to figure out what had happened to your sister, Massah KaiKai, when she went missing in Freetown. You mentioned the lack of urgency when you tried to talk to detectives both in New York and Sierra Leone. Globally, black women disappear at a really alarming rate, and these disappearances are not always taken seriously. So what are you hoping will be the outcome when people watch the story about this family looking for answers in Fighting Giants?

Babalola: When I wrote Fighting Giants, I wanted us to have a bit more accountability in how we treat one another and where our integrity lies. Because specifically, with my sister’s situation in Sierra Leone, I feel like there's a number of people who could have helped or even could help now, but maybe because we live in such a society people are just trying to survive, so they’ll say, ‘I'm not gonna stick my neck out and I’ll just keep quiet.’ And that’s a mentality I can’t stand. 

We can see someone who might need help or need assistance, who might benefit from some knowledge that we have but because it's not immediately beneficial to us, we choose not to help. And I wanted to call that out.

I also just wanted to start discussions about what we allow. What do we allow in our societies? What do we allow with each other? And are we actually just like going through the motions and trying to just build our own fortresses so that we can live in a bubble? And what is that doing to our government systems and institutions?

I know that's a lot to ask from a short film, but I'm bringing it up now and here we are talking about it.

In Fighting Giants, a mother and daughter search for answers about their missing family member in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Image courtesy of the filmmaker

Ngozi: What was the writing process like for Fighting Giants? 

Babalola: Well, I actually wanted to make this a 90 minute feature film, but feature films, especially African ones, are expensive to fund. So a friend said well why don't you just make this a short film?

I said why not because a short film is actually really accessible in a lot of different ways. I had already written the script as a feature and I tried to whittle it down to a shortened version. It took me many drafts to get a16 page script and the final film isn't even that script because I had to recreate an entire new film in post-production just because of production troubles.

The process actually took a really long time for it to get to where it is now, which is an eight and a half minute short. I started writing it in 2022, and now we're here in 2025.

 So it was a really long process and it was difficult. I had to start and stop a lot of times because I would also just get very angry having to relive what has happened to my sister and then put it on a page that was easily comprehended in traditional storytelling form.

Ngozi: You’ve worked on documentaries and films in the US and Africa.What are some of the gaps in the film industry that you’ve seen and experienced?

Babalola: I'm gonna speak from the perspective of maybe African filmmaking because I do see myself as an African filmmaker and that informs a lot of my work. I’ve seen that African films have to be from a specific lens to get funding. For something to look like it might get commercial success, it has to be trauma-based or historical based, perhaps about slavery or war. It’s unfortunately rare to see an African documentary come out in the United States that's not tied to colonialism or some sort of difficult period in African history.

I think those films are incredibly valid and really informative and they should exist, but that's not what I want to make as a filmmaker. I'm really interested in contemporary works and black identity right now, and also how our past experiences have informed where we're going towards the future.

And so when I make films in that regard, the access (to funding) is not always there. Also when you go to Africa, it depends, right? There's so much money and opportunity for African films. But let's say you're an African filmmaker from Nigeria or Sierra Leone. Unfortunately to get proper funding, you have to look for a co-production house in the UK, right? Or if you're in Senegal, you have to look for France, Belgium, et cetera.

It’s going to take time because we are still building our structures. But I think we really need to rely on our own structures and create our own work and fund and elevate things created by Africans. We need homegrown African filmmaking in every form, from distribution to building the foundations of things like grant funding and institutions for Africans by Africans, because we understand the films that we're trying to make, and it's not always through the lens of others. 

Ngozi: And you're trying to do that with the Kosinima Short Film Grant, which you started in 2022 as a grant for African filmmakers and screenwriters?

Babalola: Yes. I started a grant fund specifically for Black female or femme filmmakers. If you're a Black filmmaker, African filmmaker, African female filmmaker, the opportunities lessen based on what rung you stand on. When I was shooting ṢOJU, my documentary series, people were surprised to see me with a camera and surprised to see that I was the director. And I’d think, but there's so many of us out here. Why are y'all always pretending like we don't exist? Hire us. We exist. And our voices and our stories deserve to be heard.

So that's how the Kosinima Short Film Grant started. Everybody can benefit from making their own short film. Whether you're a seasoned filmmaker and you want a proof of concept for a project that you're working on that's longer, or you're a first time filmmaker and you want to make a short as a calling card, I figured that's a great starting point to get more stories out there that are outside of the norm.

So far, it’s been going well. We’ve got eight short films completed and plenty more plans for the fund and its films in the works.

Fighting Giants will be screening at the New York African Film Festival in May.

"I'm deeply enamored of Sierra Leone "-Syl Cheney-Coker on Writing through Exile

Syl Cheney-Coker is a Sierra Leonean poet, novelist, and journalist. Born in Freetown in 1945, he was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Oregon, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He returned to Sierra Leone but went into exile in the 90s after he was targeted by the government. Cheney-Coker is the author of several novels and anthologies including The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, which won the Africa region of the 1991 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. He now spends his time between the US and Sierra Leone. In this interview, he talks to the Poda-Poda Stories team about how literature shaped his work and writing through exile.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ngozi: Your memoir, Jollof Boy: The Early Years, was released this year. It is a rich account of Sierra Leone during the colonial era when you were a child. Why now? Why have you decided to share these stories with us in your memoir at this time? 

Cheney Coker:  I never really thought about writing my memoir. The best way to get to know anybody is through an account of what we see about our society and whatever contribution we may have made. And in my case, being a writer, I felt that I have been doing that through my books. 

However, last year, Mallam O, the publisher of the Sierra Leone Writers Series, said to me “have you started writing your memoir?” So I thought about it and said, why not? Especially as Sierra Leone is not the Sierra Leone it was before. So seeing where we are at the moment- an incredibly bankrupt society-I just felt that perhaps I should go ahead and write this memoir and reflect on a period of glory. It was not perfect, but I think it was better.

Ngozi: You've gone into exile because of your work as a writer in Sierra Leone. Can you talk about how being in exile changed your relationship with Sierra Leone over time?

Cheney Coker:  I always tell people that I never left the country, because it is Sierra Leone that gives validation to my being a writer. Without Sierra Leone as a stimulus, I wouldn't be a writer and I don't want to be a writer that is not tied to my heritage. I'm sure you've been reading African literature quite a lot. The current scope of African writers, mainly those under 50, delight in bashing the African continent. They're all writing about an escape from their various problems and the problems of society into which they were born. They’re coming to the West and saying “take me, give me a new name.Things are so bad in my country!”

But it's the madness of escapism.

My relationship with Sierra Leone has not changed and it will never ever change because as I speak to you right now, we are putting the finishing touches to my house on Leicester Hill. I don't know how many more days I have left on this planet so I'm looking forward to going home to reconnect with what is still there. 

Of course, I'm not unaware of the fact that a lot has changed. For a start, the landscape has changed. In addition to destroying all moral values, we’ve also destroyed the ecology and the environment of our society. Everything has been chopped out while we delight in being a barren landscape. And we have all of these ugly metallic buildings, concrete buildings going up. So Freetown has become, in my view, a concrete jungle and it's not what I expected Freetown to be like because I've been to other African capital cities and it's not like that.

Having said that, I'm going home hopefully sometime this year. For good. 

Charmaine: I recently graduated from an MFA program in creative writing from Texas State University and a conversation that kept coming up among us African students was how much someone's writing changes based on geography. One Nigerian classmate in particular, felt that being in America stifled his writing which is usually set at home in Nigeria. Could you speak to this: do you think wherever the writer is geographically affects the quality and the content of their work? 

Cheney Coker:  Congratulations on doing your MFA! Having said that, I don't believe that an MFA makes someone a writer. I think an MFA allows you to teach, particularly.

To be a writer is to be consumed by passion that no other expressive cultural form does to you because writing is a lonely vocation, as opposed to being a composer, a musician, or a painter. A painter has a palette and she begins to draw to paint images and colors. A composer or musician has an instrument, and the instrument talks back to you, right? But a writer, you wake up in the morning and all you have is a blank screen, or in my day before computers came to be, you have a blank piece of paper, which you've got to fill with words, and those words must be extremely very close to you. One thing the writer does not want to do is to lie to himself or herself because literature can be extremely vindictive and very treacherous. So writers who think that they can lie about their heritage or their experience just to fulfill a publisher's request are making a mistake. It's always going to be terrible when it comes out. 

“My soul is that of a poet’s.”

Syl Cheney-Coker

So my response to that is that it depends on what background the writer is coming from. Nigerian writers of my generation came from a very rich background and it didn't matter where they were. Take Wole Soyinka for instance, who spent many years in exile and still wrote some of the greatest plays like Death and The King’s Horseman, which are about his Nigerian heritage and his perception of what Nigeria was going through at various periods. No one could draw a line between whether they were written in Nigeria or written abroad. I have been in exile for a good many years and I have still been able to write about Sierra Leone. Emotionally and culturally, I'm very deeply enamored of Sierra Leone and I'm very deeply enamored of the background that I inherited.

So, it all depends on whether you bring your country or your heritage with you when you leave, or whether as soon as you get out and step into the so-called melting pot, you feel like you must become someone else.

Charmaine:  What authors, poets and novelists shaped your journey as a writer when you were growing up? 

Cheney-Coker: African literature was not taught in schools during my time. We went through the grinding machine of colonial education. So strictly speaking, the two people who shaped my perception into being a writer, were writer and physician, Raymond Sarif Easmon, and then the journalist Ibrahim Taqi, who was sent to the gallows by (then president) Siaka Stevens. 

I never really fancied myself becoming a writer. I actually wanted to be a journalist. I came to the United States during the sixties, and it was the period the Harlem Renaissance was being brought back into being, and all the writers, like James Baldwin were being taught. Of course David Diop and Leopold Senghor had all become part of the Negritude Movement and we were all being swept up into consciousness by what was going on at that time. That’s when I realised there was something in me that was empty.

I also felt that my Krio identity was not any different compared to the Harlem Renaissance or the Negritude school. I had been fed a lot of crap by colonial education and there was a subterranean journey that I had to undertake to find myself. That journey could only be achieved by becoming a writer.  

Charmaine: What were some taproot texts that inspired you to became a writer? And you’ve written poetry, creative nonfiction and novels. Which form have you most enjoyed writing in?

Cheney-Coker: I’ll answer the second question first. My soul is that of a poet’s. I think anyone reading my work would realize that. Even in my memoir you can see that it's of a poet writing. I express myself much more passionately in my poetry, because it's personal to me. Fiction gives me an opportunity to write about the collective in a wider and more dramatic format. 

To the first question, when I started writing poetry, I discovered Leopold Senghor and other negritude poets and my favorite for a long time was the great Congolese poet Tchicaya U Tam'si. He's probably the most famous French writing poet at that time from Africa. Then there was the great Peruvian poet César Vallejo whose poems I really love. The English speaking writer I admired the most because of his approach to landscape and someone's existential crisis, is the Australian writer Patrick White, particularly his books Voss and The Tree of Man. It was Patrick White who showed me that it's possible to look at a vast landscape that has not been populated before and to try to make sense of it.

I also like One Hundred Years of Solitude. When I read the first page I thought “oh my God, this is an African book!”And what Gabriel García Márquez taught me was that it is possible to write a political novel and infuse it with magic and culture.It is possible to write a political novel that is not boring.

Ngozi: I remember reading your poem, the Colour of Stones, and just marveling at the beautiful imagery that you used to describe our culture. Can you just comment on how you've examined the interiority of Sierra Leonean lives in your work?

Cheney-Coker: Culture becomes extremely central when I write about Sierra Leone. It isn't just my own immediate culture, but the general culture as a whole. I'm deeply enamored of all the cultures of my country and I may not speak the other languages, but I recognize their beauty and validity because this is what makes Africa as a continent extremely very important and different from other societies.

We are truly in the real sense of the word, a melting pot, but we don't destroy the individual ingredients that contribute to that melting pot. It's like in Sierra Leone, we have plasas, but you would taste the efo nyori, or cassava leaves or egusi. 

And so I recognize the nature of our cultural dynamics. For example, when I visit a place like Port Loko, I'm not looking for the influence of Freetown in Port Loko. I'm looking for Port Loko in Port Loko. I'm also very particular about expressing the culture which I was raised in. I try my best to recollect, to re-narrate and to express as best as possible the chapters and the passages that, my mother especially, passed down to me. And I hope she'll be very proud of me. Infact she was the inspiration behind the character, Jeanette Cromantine in The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar.

Ngozi:  What a beautiful tribute to her! And that’s a great segue to the next question. The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar recently went into reprint and Charmaine and I have our copies! The book tackles a lot of themes like the effects of the Trans Atlantic Slave trade and nation building. What does it mean for you for this book to go into reprint?

Cheney-Coker: I'll tell you a story about Alusine Dunbar. In 2012 or thereabouts, I was at the University of West Virginia in Morgantown. I was the keynote speaker at this conference and a woman came up to me and said “do you know how much I paid for this copy when I realized you were going to be the keynote speaker because I wanted you to autograph this book for me?” The book was selling for anything between five hundred and a thousand dollars! And not one penny came to me. I don't know how this happened. 

Ngozi: Yeah, I was looking for a copy on eBay and it was around that price, so I had just given up.

Cheney-Coker: Yeah, and not one penny came to me. I would get so mad I would say, how is it possible that my book is being reproduced and people were selling it online. But anyway, The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar is back. It never should have gone out of print. And so it was this new publishing house at Bloomsbury who bought some of the rights of the Heineman books.They reached out to me and said they would like to republish it. So I am glad Alusine Dunbar is back in publication and circulation and I plan to bring some copies to Sierra Leone later this year.

Anyway, how do I see some of the things related to Sierra Leone today? When you get towards the end of Alusine Dunbar, about 30 years ago, I started predicting that what is happening now, was going to happen. I saw the collapse of all moral values. I saw the greed and hunger in our intellectuals who were always sitting by their telephones waiting for calls. In those days there were only landlines. They were sitting by their telephones waiting for a call from Siaka Stevens or Saidu Momoh, so they could abandon teaching, and become ministers, et cetera, et cetera, so they could line up their pockets.

But I'm happy to see that your generation is changing everything. I'm happy there are so many writers in Sierra Leone right now, especially the poets, writers and editors like you and that is the greatest reward to me as a writer. It is not in the many books I’ve written or the dissertations on my work. What brings me the greatest joy, and I mean that sincerely, is to see that in my lifetime, there are so many promising young writers in Sierra Leone, especially women. I would not have thought this possible, given the destructive influence that my generation and the generation immediately after mine imposed on Sierra Leone. Because what is going on now is toxic. Not even the worst days of Albert Margai were like this. 

Now people are afraid. I get letters from people who say they are afraid. Since when did we become a society where people are afraid to communicate? We are supposed to be a society where regardless of where we are from, we are one nation, one country, one people, and that is what makes Sierra Leone unique.

 Charmaine: What is your advice to young Sierra Leonean writers?

Cheney-Coker: The epochs are different. By which I mean, I came into writing at a different epoch, and so my narrative is different. And you're writing during a completely disorganized and dysfunctional period where all the threads that held our society together - and this applies to Nigeria, to Kenya, Cameroon or Senegal - have disappeared. But in those other societies, they have not disappeared as they have been allowed to in Sierra Leone. There is still some semblance of cultural preservation and societal responsibilities that we no longer have in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone is a complete collapse of anything pertaining to the maintenance and the integrity of the state, and that is what frightens me.

So, your generation has a much more difficult task than my generation did. We had a lot to feed on. Ours was an expressive period. We were expressing the norms and the passions and the traditions of society. You are now singularly charged with rebuilding society.

The other problem you have to contend with is publication. There's only a small publishing house in Sierra Leone. So, we need more publishing houses but also we need a couple of good bookshops. There's not a single good bookshop in Freetown, which is a shame! I hope other Sierra Leoneans will invest and support publishing in Sierra Leone.

Ngozi: Something we always ask writers we talk to is how has writing saved your life? 

Cheney-Coker: Without writing, I probably would be dead. I could not become a doctor because the only branches of medicine that I like are pediatrics and veterinary medicine and I can’t stand seeing children and animals suffer. I hate the legal profession. I've not balanced my checkbook in the last twenty years, so I could not have become an accountant. 

So, writing saved my life in the sense that it gave me a dimension to express myself about my society and my role, without my drinking myself to death if I had done something else. And it’s also saved my life in the sense that it has exposed me to the validity of other societies, to other people and other traditions which have made me much more humane.

I cannot tell you how grateful I am that I can write and express myself in that way. Writing imposed itself on me in the sense that I never set out to be a poet or a novelist. It is just that I found that when faced with a particular situation to express myself, I picked up my pen and I started writing. 

The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar is available to purchase from Bloomsbury. Sacred River is available to purchase from Barnes and Noble. Jollof Boy and other books by Cheney-Coker are available to purchase from the Sierra Leone Writers Series.

"A professional opportunity"- Poda -Poda Stories Fellow Sulaiman Bonnie's reflection

The Poda-Poda Stories Fellowship is a year-long program that is designed to support young Sierra Leonean writers to grow in the literary industry and manage an independent creative project.

The goal of the fellowship is to inspire and train the next generation of young writers in Sierra Leone. Through access to resources, coaching, training, and support for their independent projects, we hope that fellows will enhance their creative skills, while gaining exposure to the literary world of publishing, writing and editing.

Poda -Poda Stories Inaugural Fellow Sulaiman Bonnie reflects on his work over the past year and talks about his independent project— an anthology of poems from students.