Mythological Africans Podcast

While gay African men are subject to some of the vilest forms of homophobia on the continent, they have a long and complex history among African people. In this episode, we explore…

When I was living in the mountains I got a special friend. She was living in another village, and I passed her house when I was going to church every month. One day she saw me and…

Despite the abundance of information about the negative attitudes towards intersex Africans and the hardships they face as a result, details about the various cultural underpinning…

“We are a culture that knows about death, but we don't discuss it. We don't discuss sex either. With us, you can have sex as long as you don't let us know. There is a whole languag…

This episode introduces the topic of African Sexualities and Sexual Practices. I give an overview of the various culture-specific terms used to refer to concepts, practices, and pe…

This week’s episode focuses on African Divination, a topic I first looked into as part of a project about the cultures and customs of Cameroon, my country of birth. You can read a…

It is the White Bagre, it is Bagre Day: we begin to teach the children and the women and the men. We go in again to the long room. You see the food, you see the meat. It is beer we…

"Gods, Ancestors, Guardians, Beings of the wild. The leather bottles say we should perform, because of the scorpions sting, because of suicide, aches in the belly, pains in the hea…

We closed out October with an exploration of how African people have expressed their relationship with the natural world in words. I figured for November, we should stay on theme b…

We go stargazing in part 2 of the Across African Skies Series. No topic I have investigated for Mythological Africans has delighted me more than African star folklore. It is sad, h…

Welcome to Part 1 of the Across African Skies series which focuses on the mythology, folklore and symbolism of the sun and moon among different African peoples. In this episode, we…

Modern Astronomy and Astrology are so dominated by European mythology, it's easy to forget that other people across the world also observed and forged relationships with the sun, t…

Hello friends! We’re back this week with one of my favorite sessions from the MA Twitter Spaces. This is from a while back when we read poetry and used the Friday sessions to talk…

In this week’s episode we revisit a conversation about the “Strange Suitor” tale type which shows up repeatedly in the folklore of different African peoples. In these stories, a be…

It is not often that I can say I have spent some time among the people whose stories feature in MA discussions so I am thrilled to share this week’s episode with you all. We read…

The late Binyavanga Wainaina’s hilarious essay on how to write about Africa is a great summary of the many ways in which writers, some of them Africans themselves, do the people an…

This week, we continue revisiting conversations which happened before the publication of my book, The Runaway Princess and Other Stories. Now, you may all know the “Runaway Princes…

In this episode, I chat with Ijeoma Ossi, Mark Mengjo, and Ziziian, three illustrators from the African continent with whom I worked to create portraits and scenes from a selection…

In this episode, we read a snippet from “The Runaway Princess and Other Stories”, and had an AMA in which we talked about my (chaotic) writing process, the art and the artists, the…

Hi friends, As some of you may know, I focused most of last year on writing and publishing my book: The Runaway Princess and Other Stories, a collection of stories and poems focuse…