00:03:27.300So the book covers around about the last thousand years,
00:03:32.020but we can start it around the 12th century.
00:03:35.640And it follows 12 women rulers, but also genderqueer rulers across the breadth of the African continent.
00:03:45.420And I specifically wanted to examine below the Sahara Desert as well, because so much of what we think about when it comes to African civilizations tends to be focused in northern Africa and around Egypt.
00:03:59.320and i think it fuels this idea of an underdeveloped or barren africa so i really
00:04:06.740wanted to explore from ethiopia to burundi angola madagascar and all of these figures who are
00:04:16.760elites they aren't representative of the conditions of african women during these periods from the0.74
00:04:23.640past century through to the 21st century but also the power that they wielded um whether
00:04:31.260fighting against european imperialist forces or leveraging that power against their own people
00:04:39.800to pretty detrimental means um so i'd say it's i say it's that yeah yeah no and i love that
00:04:47.280and i mean like you said there's women and also genderqueer people so that's where the title is
00:04:52.460African queens and warriors so it's expansive it encompasses different kinds of leaders
00:04:58.220exactly I I was I wanted to reflect the fact that in Jingo who is also on the front of the book
00:05:06.060how they understood their gender with plurality they didn't have gendered pronouns in their
00:05:13.120language of Kimbundu so I just I wanted to at least acknowledge that um somewhat and we're
00:05:20.380gonna get into that we're gonna get into the gender stuff oh my god there's like y'all there's
00:05:26.720a lot of gay stuff in this book and it's really exciting but first I just want to just like so
00:05:30.280everybody understands the book a bit better so how did you how many of these people had you heard of
00:05:35.240before you began the process for writing this book like all of them or some of them or how did
00:05:39.240you choose which 12 would be the 12 yeah so I knew of a few of them a lot of so I'm half Nigerian
00:05:46.300and a lot of west africans will know of nana ya santwa this um elderly figure who took on the
00:05:54.880british at the dawn of the 20th century and so there are these figures that some of us will know
00:06:02.860by virtue of what our heritage is um but many of them i hadn't encountered in depth like i knew
00:06:10.480about njinga i knew about poku um but in no depth or they came to me as as like pedagogical kind of
00:06:20.420tools um the likes of poku and moremi who um who was a ruler in present-day nigeria they are found
00:06:31.020in children's books and you know these selfless figures who gave up um who made personal sacrifices
00:06:39.500for kin and kingdom and I wanted to just dig a little bit deeper examine a bit more but crucially
00:06:48.320as an African of the diaspora I wanted it to be led by local storytellers local historians
00:06:56.440visits to heritage sites so that kind of formed a bit of the selection process I created a history
00:07:04.140nerd that I am create like a massive matrix with as many rulers that I could find that were women
00:07:11.860or genderqueer um across the continent and then kind of narrowed it down on other heritage sites
00:07:18.640still standing are there storytellers that I can locate and historians that I can locate who would
00:07:24.120be willing to engage with me and those that kind of shaped like that was one of the parameters
00:07:31.160obviously the um northern africa um you know thoughts as well shapes that and just i think
00:07:39.780also how much source material was kind of accessible to me especially as someone who
00:07:44.600is an english speaker which of course again shapes so much of the book because you will
00:07:51.160have archival materials for example in madagascar but they are in french or malagasy so that was
00:07:58.700kind of a sticking point when i was trying to research run of the luna but then being able to
00:08:04.420locate english-speaking storytellers which again skews the history that i'm i'm kind of pulling
00:08:09.680together so i think that is that is something that historians especially engaging histories that are
00:08:17.440in indigenous tongues or other languages um how we're mediating all of this through language i
00:08:24.680think language comes up a lot across the book as it should but those were a couple of the factors
00:08:30.060and also if I would be able to actually have any access so for example Sudan and you know
00:08:39.460South Sudan those were places that I was just I'm not sure that I can actually safely access and
00:08:45.960it's why I didn't end up traveling to Ethiopia even though I knew that I wanted to study
00:14:29.720You have the fact that some of them would never talk about the defeats of their colonial
00:14:35.840forces and really emphasize their victories there's so much that has been augmented in terms
00:14:43.440of western history production and i wanted to actually lean into the understanding that
00:14:50.780the archive is also a site of violence and when you have abducted africans who are described as
00:15:00.440you know listed as cargo but not as valuable as gold or mahogany and but this is the only way
00:15:06.860that we understand their existence their presence that they they lived then that is also a violence
00:15:14.480and i guess searching for counter histories that grapple with the um the colonial agendas that
00:15:25.920underpin so much of what we know of the African continent that was crucial to me and I really
00:15:32.460leaned into I tried to lean into my subjectivity and also account for the fact that I am an outsider
00:15:41.720that the real experts are the people that I spoke to those are the conversations that hold all of
00:15:47.480the gems and I didn't want to bastardize their words I wanted to kind of present our conversations
00:15:53.680and exchanges as they were so that's a really long answer to quite a simple question
00:15:59.620no and I think all the nuance is really good for people to understand who haven't read your book
00:16:05.740yet just to know that like you're there in the book and you're throughout like you're
00:16:09.320interrogating these questions like you said about well and I appreciate this as well in in your book
00:16:14.380that the the figures are all given the respect of looking at the nuance of their life like not just
00:16:20.360a hero not just a villain but all all the different sides to present them as like a full-fledged
00:16:25.060person but you mentioned the the way that some of these records were colonial based with their0.90
00:16:30.740biases and their understanding and that gets us into all the queer stuff in your book which I
00:16:35.160love to talk about especially because it's pride month so can we start with Njinga and absolutely
00:16:43.440pronouns and gender absolutely so njinga is such a fascinating figure who is widely
00:16:53.840presented as a queen as a woman um which again really bolsters nationalistic um symbolism
00:17:04.080and especially when um in 1960 that was the year of africa and you had all of these present-day
00:17:12.380countries emerging and becoming independent. They wanted to bolster this kind of pan-Africanist
00:17:19.320fervor with, you know, these historical figures who have risen up against these colonial forces
00:17:25.020before, which means that we can do it again. And so Njinga was quite perfect for that, defying0.84
00:17:31.16013 Portuguese governors who were trying to squeeze the kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba,0.81
00:17:39.640which are found in present-day Angola um across her reign so her reign their reign this is the
00:17:46.680problem um so even then right I have this is the thing around the pronouns because the English
00:17:55.700language it it imbues so much meaning into words that didn't exist in the lot of the languages of
00:18:06.120these African societies. So N'Jinga's language of Kimbundu, it didn't have any gendered pronouns.
00:18:13.280And therefore, to describe them as she, her, it, I think, ushers in a perceived notion of what that
00:18:23.840person should look like, how they should engage, what that behaviour looks like. Meanwhile, N'Jinga0.96
00:18:29.060often wanted to be referred to by a male coded name wore masculine clothing sought to be
00:18:37.900understood on parity with their portuguese counterparts which was really confusing to the
00:18:45.060people well to the occupiers to the portuguese occupiers because they had an understanding of
00:18:50.300a queen of a donna um and it wasn't just in jinga as well um within their court they had
00:19:00.040people who we would describe today as assigned um male at birth but lived their lives out as
00:19:09.440women were understood as grandmother they were called kim banders and they were believed to have
00:19:17.300a very special power there was an honor for any man to be married to kianbanda and i think
00:19:27.320particularly exploring in jinga and also the ogodje who are the all women fighting regiment
00:19:34.860um of the ancient kingdom of dahomey and were a lot of historians they almost have question marks
00:19:43.480about whether they could have ever been sexually active with each other even though there is
00:19:49.720evidence that they were and they colonial historians have described it in retrospect as
00:19:56.980these Dahomeans trying to follow through their concept of duality which runs throughout their
00:20:04.660belief systems of one thing must always be matched by another that if people outside of the palace0.99
00:20:11.040were having sex with women sex workers and other women then of course I guess Leogogier maybe did
00:20:18.680the same thing but it was carried out through to its logical extreme. So here you see a lot of0.92
00:20:25.120historians imbuing their work with their own biases, with their own conditions of heteronormativity
00:20:32.900and unable to actually explore the expansiveness that we know is inherent in queerness that we
00:20:41.840know is inherent within sexual expression gender expression and in jingas gender plurality
00:20:50.580is understood perhaps as a costume perhaps as a way to accrue more respect by putting on
00:20:58.520a facade of a man whereas the godier it's you know this is just character to its logical extreme
00:21:06.060there's no other reason why these soldiers would want to have sex with other women or with each0.99
00:21:12.360other and i think the virtue of being a black lesbian woman means that i enter these spaces0.96
00:21:20.040as a historian you know these as living testament these are not uh beyond the realm of possibility
00:21:27.900Whereas they are, there's so much question and doubt and really underpinned by this understanding that homosexuality, queerness, transness is new, is recent and didn't originate or exist in African societies,
00:21:53.600especially predating contact with colonial forces and it's I felt like it was so critical to
00:22:03.800include not only these figures and these like histories that predate the terms queer and trans
00:22:12.820but we would understand them as such today but also little other examples about the Sangomas
00:22:18.500of um zulu societies found in south africa who marry people of any gender um the besotho women
00:22:28.580who are found in present day lesotho who have always had long-standing relationships between
00:22:35.140women and that is just the the state of play that is their cultural um that's performed part of their
00:22:42.300cultural beliefs i've really wanted to include it because they're i think a lot of black africans
00:22:49.720and queer africans will no doubt have encountered the understanding that queerness and sexuality
00:22:59.440lesbianism staff street all of it is some sort of western import is some sort of white import into
00:23:06.200our previously very religious christian um societies and which allows so much myth but
00:23:15.120like an externalism of queerness which has always existed within african societies so it was really
00:23:24.120crucial for me to include it but also i hope that you know maybe people will be drawn to the book by
00:23:31.180this idea of queens and um you know these elite figures because they want an exploration of
00:23:41.360african histories that don't hinge on enslavement and trauma and unimaginable unimaginable
00:23:50.240suffering and so kind of turn towards pictures of wealth but so they're drawn to the book hopefully
00:23:58.160and then i've just slipped in some queer theory there and just slipped in you know a reckoning
00:24:04.840with um christianity a reckoning with um transness and hopefully just pulling people into
00:24:16.480wider areas of discourse that they didn't expect when initially picking up the book um so yeah
00:24:25.860it reminds me um of just some what a lot of recent scholars are doing now talking about
00:24:32.480indigenous cultures in north america for instance and talking about like the the damage that
00:24:39.520colonialism did everywhere is expansive and multifaceted and part of that was kind of coming
00:24:46.240to a place and seeing something that they didn't that wasn't their experience it's like oh this
00:24:50.760person is wearing a dress and to me that looks like a man and that must mean that these are0.96
00:24:54.780backwards people that this must mean this has to be fixed or changed instead of understanding what0.99
00:24:59.740the culture was and so a lot of like the work like you're doing in here is kind of explaining well
00:25:03.680here's what it was like before here's what they might have seen and it was misinterpreted and
00:25:08.240here's what it actually was and that leads to so many i mean i'm really happy to be talking to you
00:25:13.600about this in pride month because all the discussion about like oh there's all these
00:25:17.920trans people and there didn't used to be it's like no there always was and then colonialism
00:25:22.420stamped it out. And now it's coming back to how it maybe was. It's not a new invention. And I0.93
00:25:30.580think it's so great that you have these concrete, specific examples of cultures where this was
00:25:35.120happening, where same-sex relationships were happening. And it's not new. It's actually very
00:25:40.360old. And yeah, so I was just so happy that that was part of your book. And now for a quick
00:28:21.200And I guess this is, I think this is such an interesting part of like publishing as an industry, right, as well.
00:28:29.160Because I think that they want sometimes a very specific and like categorized idea of what you're working on, what kind of work you're producing.
00:28:39.540and okay this is an african history book but i really hope that it kind of pushes a bit at the
00:28:49.240genre in terms of actually this is feminism this is politics this is queer theory this is
00:28:56.820so much um that i guess when we're talking about pride month as well i i would be really intrigued
00:29:05.280if my book gets included in conversations around queerness around pride because i think that that
00:29:12.460there are still narratives that we're troubling but african history means that it stands in silo
00:29:17.740away from queer history away from trans histories and like you said that they are not only are they
00:29:25.520intertwined they have predated the terms they have existed long before you know missionaries
00:29:32.840started bringing over their families and their nuclear family setups to try and demonstrate
00:29:38.640to indigenous populations that this is actually how you should be living your life you seem to0.94
00:29:44.120have no established mother or father within the family okay that can't work a whole community0.57
00:29:50.840cannot mother or parent a child it actually has to look very individualized this is you know you
00:29:57.120have your own homestead you have your own yeah so then kind of um re-instituting these0.91
00:30:05.300heteronormative values while at the same time ridding um indigenous populations of
00:30:12.260their places of worship and commemoration their shrines so though i would say that
00:30:19.000um the bringing in of nuclear families to kind of diminish not only queerness but also
00:30:28.320kinship ties this was part of a huge western um strategy to uh supplant to replace to0.85
00:30:41.160demonize and point people towards actually this is how you should be living
00:30:47.040while completely misunderstanding and recklessly and carelessly just displacing everything that
00:30:58.440had come before so this is also when we're talking about for example queens um in english we we queen
00:31:07.280can actually stand in for so much what kind of queen are we talking about are we talking about
00:31:12.620someone who is a queen consort a queen it gets used um to describe so much whereas we're trying
00:31:22.700to fix that language to african elite figures where queen might be better replaced with high
00:31:31.300priestess queen might be better replaced with you know some sort of divine figure so alongside
00:31:38.200besides distorting all of their familial uh social relational practices also distorting0.95
00:31:47.240complete like their understandings of rule sovereignty um and the ways that their societies
00:31:55.380were functioning um and honestly it's still depressing it's it's a because i'm and i
00:32:03.440i sometimes think about my conclusion i'm just like maybe i should have things on your lighter
00:32:10.020note but i guess i i was i was being really real in how um how devastating it is to see the wealth
00:32:21.880of cultural systems beliefs um ways of living that were
00:32:30.980disbanded stamped out demonized and like historians like myself historians in those
00:32:42.620present-day countries are doing what they can to preserve uh snatch it all of the little glimpses
00:32:48.940that they see because it wasn't deemed to be in line with european western ideas of civilization
00:32:57.680um and as white superior um societies it was their job their duty to impose their beliefs on0.84
00:33:10.720the barbaric African societies that they sought out um yeah it's it's it's difficult and I think
00:33:22.060especially when you're maybe dealing with um histories that are so close to your identities1.00
00:33:26.800in some ways as well um but I at least hope with pulling together a couple of these African
00:33:35.360histories that it just gives people a starting point um a a way of challenging western history
00:33:43.020production just saying okay actually if you can bend and augment what this history looked like
00:33:50.760here then where else have you done that and to kind of search outwardly from that point
00:33:57.120well and also just in terms of the the way that the records the the colonial writing about these
00:34:05.100people was partially, you know, propaganda to explain. It's like, and this is why it was
00:34:10.260important that the British or the Dutch or the Portuguese came in and changed everything because1.00
00:34:14.740look at how horrifying it was before. I'm using air quotes, listeners. But I mean, that really0.99
00:34:21.480comes out of the story of like Rana Valuna, for instance, who is still, like you're talking about
00:34:27.820the people we're talking to there, like she was so demonized at the time that even people in that
00:34:32.160country still are just like oh she was a bad queen I think somebody called her who you talked to can
00:34:36.300you talk about her like that complicated legacy and how how that came to be absolutely so Rana
00:34:44.200Valuna is a 19th century ruler um ruled over in Marina and in present-day Madagascar and
00:34:52.080she followed through with what her husband started her husband Radama wanted the island to become0.77
00:35:00.740an island state that rivaled the british that rivaled the french and to follow codes of
00:35:07.000self-sufficiency to have minimal contact with other nations and to truly rule themselves
00:35:14.240and part of the threat to that was christianity you had these christian missionaries that were
00:35:22.680beginning to convert Marina peoples and Rana Valuna took that as not even kind of like a
00:35:34.640political issue but also an issue of like war and sovereignty because with the Marina people
00:35:41.740it was understanding their ruler as a divine figure who also channels the will of the ancestors
00:35:50.660So to follow Jesus, for example, is to not only take on a new set of beliefs, but to completely sperm your ancestral beliefs as well.
00:36:02.080And so Rana Valuna took to torturing, to killing, hunting down converts and missionaries across the island.
00:36:15.420and when the british because you had like these um british colonial kind of dwellers
00:36:25.780representatives who were attempting to make a life on the island when rana valuna was turning
00:36:33.260her wrath towards them expecting them to either carry out the work that would normally be reserved
00:36:39.220for enslaved people or to simply vacate the island if they weren't willing to do that
00:36:44.820Then the British, the French, this was such an affront to their power. They wanted to, the same way that the British had hold of the island of Mauritius, they wanted to repeat the same thing for themselves as well, because it would aid their trading routes.0.51
00:37:04.480And here was this brown woman, this vigorously kind of determined woman who wanted nothing to do with them, who was actually spurning the overtures of, you know, these Christian powers who were only trying to expand their wealth, their knowledge to these uncivilized savages, right?0.76
00:37:32.240So they began to, in their home countries, particularly in British, a lot of propaganda, a lot of very anti-Ranovaluna, anti kind of the Malagasy kind of peoples.0.77
00:37:50.640but at the same time they had princess victoria who was coming through so their criticism couldn't
00:37:58.380rest on the fact that ranvaluna was a woman but rather that she was unsaved uncivilized1.00
00:38:04.640she was a malay jezebel she was brown with smallpox marks all over her face compared to0.98
00:38:11.840the pristine white womanhood of this fair queen this white queen coming through0.93
00:38:19.260um so this very much has shaped the legacy of rana valuna and how she earned you know titles
00:38:28.320like the bloody mary of madagasta these very there was a binary that had to be constructed
00:38:34.220between Rana Valuna and Victoria and this also is coupled with the very incredibly brutal
00:38:44.920violent acts like she halved essentially her population like across her reign and
00:38:52.800there was so much violence wrapped up in what she did and what a number of the figures in the book0.98
00:39:01.020and Jenga was critical to the funnelling of enslaved Africans through their kingdoms.
00:39:08.480And unfortunately for us, our understanding of their cruelty is so hampered,
00:39:17.440is so garbled by the determined agendas of the Western and colonial chroniclers
00:39:25.460who were um divvying up their lives who were at the same time trying to make their rules and
00:39:34.340reigns really lurid to really jump off the page and grab the british public the british reading
00:39:39.980public who were encountering these um tales of tropical islands where there are lemurs and
00:39:47.800monkeys running free that are you know dominated by the established people like this was there was
00:39:54.420also a duty on the part of these writers to conjure up really fantastical imagery that
00:40:01.320suited the readership, that bolstered their understanding of their own white superiority
00:40:06.420and why they believed that they were in a position to redeem, to save, to deliver
00:40:15.440um societies like the marina peoples um and of course this there is no shortage of understanding
00:40:27.700the depravity of a lot of rana voluna's actions um but it's also that her role is often presented
00:40:35.940as a silo she was just you know just a mad queen rather than examining the the context the
00:40:45.020conditions, what she was reacting to, the fact that she was continuing her husband's legacy.1.00
00:40:50.500A lot of the things that he had put in place were blamed on Raina Valluna. And so it was framed as
00:40:57.480this madwoman who had come in and disrupted what her, you know, honourable husband had been0.84
00:41:06.140starting. He had understood that he needed the British and the French. This wasn't true. He,0.92
00:41:11.400you know he was for isolationism but again so there is misogyny there is racist and um0.99
00:41:21.220oh the the word has literally floated out of my head but I use it all the time anyway eugenics0.75
00:41:29.900yes oh thank god um the yeah the myths of white superiority that they all underpin how0.77
00:41:38.760rana voluna has been historicized and is understood on the madagascan island today
00:41:47.100um and how we read her as well so i've wanted to kind of trouble our understanding of these
00:41:54.820figures who you know are presented as villains um or as simply heroes and actually that it does
00:42:05.640none of us a it's a disservice to all of us um to look at people with such a reductive and
00:42:15.180lacking nuance kind of a way and that was a terrible way of wording that um
00:42:22.400but yeah I guess that's that's kind of the legacy of run of luna which is
00:42:27.860really complicated it means that like you said some people understand her is a really bad queen
00:42:33.320other people that I spoke to understood her as some sort of feminist figure who was taking a
00:42:38.760stand against anti-imperialism and it's it's so loaded it's so complicated and when I think about
00:42:45.960Madagascar I'm I just I really wish that I could find out you know just how Rana Voluna I would
00:42:54.340understand the history of Madagascar since she died um the way that her son unraveled basically
00:43:03.220all of her life's work the way that Madagascar was colonized by the French anyway the legacies
00:43:09.540that you see across the island today like I noticed how many um when I was at my hotel and1.00
00:43:16.840I ended up asking someone about this but just you'd see a lot of young Malagasy women with0.72
00:43:22.300white older men and I was seeing this every night constantly and this is also part of the legacies
00:43:28.920because um there is such a good standard of living for uh westerners in madagascar particularly if you
00:43:38.900are a french person you speak french um there has been an encouragement over like the last decade or
00:43:45.820two for older white french men to you know build a life in madagascar where you have a cheap standard0.56
00:43:55.220of living you have you know malagasy women who there is there are a lot of sex workers but then0.85
00:44:02.380there's also this assumption that every malagasy woman is just up for it because you swan in with
00:44:08.460all of this money um this is a colonial legacy and it's it's permeates the island today um so it's
00:44:18.580There is so much that's loaded in Rana Valuna's story, but also why I wanted to also focus on the contemporary, because you cannot separate the Madagascan island today from its past as an Imerina kingdom heralded, led by Rana Valuna.
00:44:39.060Yeah. And I think, too, I come across this just in my work as well. And just a lot of time when you see a woman leader, a genderqueer leader anywhere in history who was in any way brutal, who was in any way a military success.
00:44:56.900And then it's sort of like, oh, wow, this person, like this is, look at all these things.0.83
00:45:00.520Renaud Lovune is such a good example of this.
00:45:02.680Or Njinga, if you look at them, it's like, but what were they up against?
00:45:07.840It's like, you need to put it, and your book does this really well, I think,
00:45:10.380of putting it in the context of like, yeah, like they did,
00:45:12.440these were the brutal acts that they seem to have perpetuated.0.59
00:45:15.100And these were the brutal acts that the British were doing,0.81
00:45:17.460that the Portuguese were doing, that the Dutch were doing.
00:45:19.220It's not, it's not just like everything was chill.0.97
00:45:21.620And suddenly this mad woman came in and started killing everybody.
00:45:24.280It's like, it was a reaction to what was happening. And we celebrate that in some like, I don't know, Boudicca in England, you know, fighting against the Romans. It's like, hell yeah, look at this woman. It's not just like, oh, she killed all these people. It's like, that was great because that was a white woman. And because it's sort of like a history of like the, I forget if she was Anglo-Saxon, but like, you know, of like kicking the Romans out of England. That's like a success story.0.93
00:45:48.740So like in that context, we can celebrate her. But in these contexts, it's like if you remove the context, yeah, Rana Lavuna seems like a madwoman. But it's like, no, this is what she was fighting. And she knew this is what happened to other places. And this is why she was so determined about it.0.87
00:46:02.880Absolutely. And also these systems already demonized her, criminalized her for rejecting European imperialism, for, you know, being a brown person who decided that she didn't want to engage these European powers who were intent on her kingdom and the resources of her land.
00:46:25.240So we're not even able, I think, very, well, I tried, but it's very difficult to appraise her cruelty without having to, okay, let me say that again.0.57
00:46:44.740It's very difficult to appraise her cruelty because it's been so obfuscated by the fact that she was a brown woman that needed to be taken down, that she was an African that needed to be taken down because of the nerve in the first place for rejecting Christianity, for rejecting European ideals.0.89
00:47:02.220so when you're already starting from that base level that completely changes like you said like0.89
00:47:08.500the playing field it's it's not like they were on equal footing and then suddenly you know
00:47:14.160rana valuna started chopping people in half like that's not how it played out but of course
00:47:19.540so much of that has been removed from the official narratives that have emerged out of
00:47:25.960you know British history production and I guess this is why it's so critical for
00:47:33.760increasingly more historians more scholars to be working from a completely in my opinion
00:47:42.700a critical understanding of the colonial archive and its legacies and how we go about
00:47:51.500disassembling those myths while trying to locate these figures locate the acts that they did
00:47:58.400whether those were you know good um and contributed to the success of their lands and the success of
00:48:06.820their peoples or whether they were brutal and harmful um but it requires us to do the very
00:48:14.080best we can not to repeat colonial myth. Well, thank you so much for talking to me today. And
00:48:21.540thank you so much for writing this book. I was so excited, like just on a personal note. So I do
00:48:26.280this podcast where I talk about women from history. And a few years ago, I was making a conscious
00:48:30.320effort to try to talk about not just people from England, France, Spain, because there's so many
00:48:36.240books about those people already. So for me as an English speaker, it's like, well, that's who I'm
00:48:40.320able to research. I'm like, no, I want to learn about other people. I want to learn about the
00:48:43.800Queens of Africa. And it's just like, Jenga was kind of it. I was like, that's the only person
00:48:49.060I could find enough information about that I could do a podcast about it. So I was like,
00:48:53.840this book exists. This is amazing. You're introducing me to so many people I hadn't
00:48:57.280heard of. So just like personally, I'm just like, oh, I'm excited to have new people to
00:49:00.760know about and to maybe get to explore more deeply. So I appreciate that very much as a
00:49:05.600podcaster. You are welcome. Thank you for reading.
00:49:09.900and you're going to be doing you are doing so many events this episode is airing towards the
00:49:15.840beginning of june if people want to keep up with all the many appearances that you're going to be
00:49:19.840doing you have a website the lists where you're going to be and when right yes i do just paul
00:49:24.860appan.com i'm honestly just paul appan on everything apart from uh twitter formerly
00:49:30.680known as x because i got rid of that didn't i um but yeah i'm just about i normally update my
00:49:37.540instagram the most and of course my website yeah well thank you so much for talking with me today
00:49:42.840about this book and i hope that you continue to have great success talking to to people about it
00:49:48.780as people are able to read it actually i have one more question which is what has the response been
00:49:53.460like to people who have read it like now that you're out in the world talking about it with
00:49:56.660people it has honestly been like really um humbling in a lot of ways especially when i'm talking to
00:50:05.360older africans um who just talk about how they've been looking for like 20 years for something
00:50:15.020around this topic and specifically with the focus on african women rulers but i'm obviously
00:50:22.620throwing in genderqueer rulers because you will learn at any age um and just like how powerful
00:50:30.920it is to see it in the kind of mainstream kind of space to be able to go into a waterstones and
00:50:40.200see a book about 12 african women and genderqueer rulers just staring out at you so that's been
00:50:47.080incredible um and i think what's touched me most is just people who are from the communities and
00:50:55.000peoples like the ethnic groups that are mentioned within the book um and I guess just feeling like
00:51:02.480they have a greater connection um with their community as a result with their identity as a
00:51:09.340result so that has been incredible but of course they've also been because of my stance on
00:51:16.980challenging um western history production and the archive and searching counter histories
00:51:25.120then people who may be very um beholden to institutions and academic institutions
00:51:34.800questioning you know objectivity and well how can you critique like western scholars in this way
00:51:43.600involved but um which I always expected um but I think because I always knew I always knew who I
00:51:52.600was writing this for or had in mind I was thinking of Africans on the continent and on the and within
00:52:00.020the diaspora and that has been my sole kind of focus and that is the only way that I know how
00:52:08.440to engage these different modes of storytelling that come pop up across the book whether it's you
00:52:14.940know dance or praise poems or whatever it is um i i i feel i hope that i have done them proud
00:52:25.820um and yeah from the response like it's there's there's been excitement um so that's nice and