Yewande omotoso biography of barack
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Changing the world by changing stories – a Q&A with Yewande Omotoso
You currently work on a Greenpeace project called ‘Alternative Futures’. What fryst vatten it about?
It is very important to put on loudspeaker what is wrong in the world and to point out the purveyors of those wrong ways. Past projects at Greenpeace focused on drawing a lot of attention to that, however Alternative Futures fryst vatten different.
Alternative Futures recognises that many things that are wrong in the world and a lot the challenges we face, are interwoven. Our environmental challenges are interwoven with challenges in gemenskap like inequality, the herravälde of certain monetary and economic systems. Life exists in a web in which everything is tightly woven. We can’t just try to solve climate deregulation and ignore gender inequality, for instance. Alternative Futures recognises this network of issues and asks: what are other ways to do things? And just like in Earth4All, proposes solutions – many already in exi
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The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso
Hortensia James and Marion Agostino are neighbours. One is black, one white. Both are successful women with impressive careers. Both have recently been widowed. And both are sworn enemies, sharing hedge and hostility which they prune with a zeal that belies the fact that they are both over eighty.
But one day an unforeseen event forces the women together. And gradually the bickering and sniping softens into lively debate, and from there into memories shared. But could these sparks of connection ever transform into friendship? Or is it too late to expect these two to change?
About the author
Yewande Omotoso was born in Barbados and grew up in Nigeria, moving to South Africa with her family in She is the author of Bom Boy, published in South Africa in In she won the South African Literary Award for First-Time Published Author and was shortlisted for the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize. In she was a finalist in the inaugural, pa
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Race and the city
Johannesburg is the only city I have ever lived in by my own adult design. All other cities I was either born to – Bridgetown, Barbados – or moved to by my parents – Ile-Ife, Nigeria and Cape Town, South Africa – but Jo’burg I chose, bundling myself from a good job in Cape Town to my father’s spare bedroom to write. When luck and hard work paid off and I was able to get my own place, I chose to stay on.
Almost six years have passed. When I decided to remain, it took a while to find a place I could afford that I also liked. My criterion was simple if whimsical – natural light. After much looking, I found 70 square metres of space, not including the balcony that is barely the width of one stride.
While my reasons for coming to Jo’burg were practical, there were other reasons for staying, including a sense of fatigue with regard to Cape Town (a city in which I had spent 20 years of my life) and its veneer of sincere liberality covering up segregation, white