Nnedi's Wahala Zone Blog

Written by Nnedi Okorafor, Given on February 7, 2025 “A Golden smile from a Golden Girl of the games.”

That’s a quote from a 1965 news article about my mom. It features a fresh-faced, grinning photo of her and goes on to talk about her winning the gold medal in Brazzaville, the Republic of the Congo.

My mom won medal after medal throwing the javelin back then and even qualified for Nigeria’s Olympic Team. In her memoir, she wrote about hiding from the paparazzi. What a time. The Golden Girl with the Golden Smile. My brother Emezie even wrote a song inspired by it called “Golden Girl”.

It was the perfect description. She was a valedictorian, an athletic champion, proud, beautiful, super smart, confident, so so extroverted, she loved people. So many people knew and loved my mother.

For the last two weeks, I’ve been doing physical therapy to work on the proprioception (the body's ability to sense movement, action, and location) in my legs. I have very poor proprioception in my legs after what happened (for context, see my memoir specifically about what happened and how it made me a writer, BROKEN PLACES & OUTER SPACES). Thus, my balance is poor in a specific way…it feels like my legs disappear when I’m not looking at them.

My day at San Diego Comic-Con was cool, but I want to talk about the crazy thing my daughter Anyaugo and I did that night. I didn’t like our hotel, so after a lovely dinner with my agent, we decided to dip.

We drove from San Diego to Phoenix, starting the trip at 10PM. It was…surreal, terrifying at times, beautiful at other times.

Original image used for the first edition of WHO FEARS DEATH

Ever since my sister Ngozi passed on November 23rd, 2021 and then my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, I’ve been feeling really...high up. That I am high up on this beautiful mountain and looking down and I'm afraid of how high I’ve climbed. I've been trying to figure out what this meant. And I realized that what I was contemplating was the concept of aging.

The Key

By Nnedi Okorafor

It was due to a stupid thing done in a fit of panic that Fwadausi Bello altered her life forever. It’s amazing how sometimes the things we worry about most don’t happen and what we should worry about are often those very things we never imagine. So was the case with Fwadausi.

For the last few months, she’d been losing little things, including her favorite pencil from school, the plastic bracelet one of her friends had given her, and her lip gloss.

I started using the term africanfuturism (a term I coined) because I felt… 

1. The term afrofuturism had several definitions and some of the most prominent ones didn't describe what I was doing.  

2. I was being called this word [an afrofuturist] whether I agreed or not (no matter how much I publicly resisted it) and because most definitions were off, my work was therefore being read wrongly.  

3. I needed to regain control of how I was being defined.

There has been a lot of talk about the word “akata” the last two weeks and there’s been a lot of talk about the schism and conversation between Africans currently on the continent of Africa and African Americans (Africans in the country of America). 

This isn’t a new conversation to me, both concerning the word and the greater issue. It’s one I’ve dealt with all my life, being an American-born Igbo, a Nigerian American, Naijamerican. I’m not going to get into that today.