Ugandan climate change activist, Vanessa Nakate’s book, A Bigger Picture, has been listed in the Brittle Paper’s 50 notable African books of 2021.
Brittle Paper, an online literary magazine for readers of African Literature has since 2018 curated an annual list of the most impactful African books.
On the 2021 list, Nakate features with her writing debut in which she shares her story as a young Ugandan woman who sees that her community bears disproportionate consequences to the climate crisis.
Published in November this year, the 240-page book also captures Nakate’s sentiments about how activists from African nations and the global south are not being heard in the same way as activists from white nations are heard.
In 2019, inspired by Swedish young climate justice activist, Greta Thunberg, Nakate, 25, became Uganda’s first Fridays for Future protestor, awakening to her personal power and summoning within herself a commanding political voice.
While attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2020 as one of five international delegates, Nakate’s image was cropped out of a photo by the Associated Press. The photo featured the four other activists, who were all white.
It highlighted the call Nakate has been making all along: for both environmental and social justice on behalf of those who have been omitted from the climate discussion and who are now demanding to be heard.
Brittle Paper’s 2021 book list also features notable writers like Wole Soyinka (Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth), Chimamanda Ngozi (Notes on Grief) and Nadifa Mohamed (The Fortune Men).
The Brittle list also has We Are All Birds of Uganda, a book by Hafsa Zayyan, a British-born writer.
Tackling issues of identity, religion and colonialism, Zayyan’s story explores the legacy of former Ugandan President, Idi Amin’s expulsion of thousands of people of South Asian heritage from Uganda in 1972.
To Zayyan, winner of the 2019 Merky Books New Writer’s Prize, the 1972 Ugandan-Asian expulsion was something she had only learned about in the past five years, despite it being a massive part of British Colonial and African industry.
She says the story of Asians’ expulsion from Uganda seemed to have been erased from history and that’s why she chose to tell it.
The tagline for the Merky Books New Writer’s competition was ‘stories that are not being told’ and that’s how Zayyan settled for the Ugandan Asian story.
