Issue Six
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“The reason I am topless on the back of my book jackets and always will be is because one hundred years from now I want people to realize that African women who walked around naked all day were also capable of writing books and having complex opinions and creating perspective out of sorrow.”
-Kola Boof, during her interview with Amsterdam African News Authority's Omar Aberjan in 1999
Whether I believe or disbelieve her story, whether I agree or disagree, I can describe Kola Boof's autobiography, Diary of a Lost Girl, with one word: fearless. It is a book that speaks of the atrocities in the Sudan through the mouth of a Sudanese woman who has seen things with her own eyes. It addresses, the real consequences of female circumcision, and shows Kola Boof as what she really is, talented, interesting, flawed, unapologetic, loud mouthed, darkly humorous, strong; a lioness whose roar deserves to be heard.
Kola's autobiography is inflammatory. She discusses the cliterectomy she was given as a child and how this affected her life as a woman, mainly as a source of physical pain. Kola tells the story of her parents (her father was Arab and her mother, African) who were murdered in her village for speaking out against the modern slavery that continues in the Sudan. Kola was only six years old when it happened and she spent that night alone with their slaughtered bodies outside of their home. Because of this, Kola writes, she refuses to have the surgery to reverse the damage of her cliterectomy. It is the only thing of her mother's that she retained. Kola speaks of how her Arab grandparents put her up for adoption because she was too dark skinned, her skin color and features an embarrassment to the family.
This was how Kola ended up in the United States as a young girl where her experience as an American showed her that “authentic” black women (black women with African hair, dark skin and African features) are invisible and black men are “castrated.”
In her book, Kola discusses how she was a B-movie actress in African films, a high-brow prostitute who dwelt within the circle of the elite (including Libya's leader, Muammar al-Qaddafi.), a spy for Al-Harakat Al-Shaabia Le Tahreer Al-Sudan (the Sudanese People's Liberation Army). Kola also claims to have a fatwa decreed on her ordering her death because of her fervent criticism of the Muslim government in her native Sudan. And of course there is the kicker where she discusses with great thoroughness the months she was forced to spend in Morocco as Osama bin Laden's mistress.
“The Dinka women of Sudan say that the devil is the most beautiful man you'd ever want to lay eyes on. They advise that this is how you will know him. Of course, I never took those words seriously until I encountered my now infamous ex-lover, Osama bin Laden,” she writes in her book.
Boof claims that she was kidnapped, raped and held captive by Osama for several months and that his interest in her stemmed from the fact that she was a “Black Arab,” a low creature that he felt free to use as he wished. Diary of a Lost Girl is saturated with so many details (such as Osama's favourite foods, types of music and intimate physical attributes), checking Kola's facts will be quite easy.
So who is Kola Boof? Fraud or heroine? Fact or myth?To know Kola, one must know that she is a mysterious controversial figure with a lot of enemies; enemies made because of her provocative statements. She has essentially been blacklisted by most American literary publications. In the Untied States, where Boof now resides, you won't find many reviews of her latest book in African American and mainstream publications.
Over the years, many have speculated that Kola Boof was an internet hoax, a website with a voice and false picture, because she was so hard to pin down. If you run an internet search on her, you'll stumble across the 2002 New York Times article titled, Mystery Enshrouds Kola Boof, Writer and Internet Persona. The article takes well aimed shots at Kola's credibility. However follow-up investigations by the American television network, Fox News, and others confirmed the more debatable aspects of Kola's story. The majority of the other online articles you'll find on Kola's work are mainly through her own website and the websites of known proponents of her work. It is no easy feat to find an unbiased opinion on Kola Boof.
Nonetheless, Kola Boof is a real person. I have communicated with her and viewed the footage of her interview with Rita Cosby on Fox News in August 23, 2003. Derrick Bell, famous for being the first tenured black professor at the Harvard Law School in 1971 and currently one of the most highly respected constitutional law professors in America, knows Kola personally and champions Kola's work. However, he feels that Osama bin Laden has overshadowed her talent.
“I regret that her relationship with Osama bin Laden has shifted attention away from her writing skill and the courage exhibited in speaking out against the genocide in her home country, conditions which even the [American] president has now felt the need to speak out against,” he said.
Chinwezu, a Nigerian author of several books, including The West and The Rest of US (which was edited by the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning novelist, Toni Morrison), has been in contact with Kola for years.
“I believe Kola is telling the truth about Bin Laden,” Chinwezu said. “Her story rings true. It is consistent with what I know of Arab attitudes and behaviour towards blacks, from the historical record, and also from my interactions with Arab schoolmates during my student days. Those who, out of ignorance, doubt her story should look at it in light of what's happening to Black women today in Darfur at the hands of the Janjaweed.”
Kola Boof's real name is Naima bint Harith and she was born in Omdurman, Sudan. She is the author of several literary works including a collection of poetry called Nile River Woman, two collections of short stories and her recently published memoir Diary of a Lost Girl.
To know Kola, one must know her grand breasts. Standing over six feet tall, Kola is voluptuous and a rich dark brown as she so proudly likes to proclaim. Her topless photos say more than a topless photo in magazine like Playboy. Chinwezu likens Kola's photos to Fela's “iconic nude-peasant-working-in-the-sweltering-sun attire” which Fela used as a form of artistic expression. “I consider it a mark of genuine Afrocentrism. It shows that you accept being black and African without reservations, without apologies to anybody,” Chinweizu said about Kola.
To know Kola is to know that she asserts she was forced to be the mistress of Osama bin Laden, a fact which she says she originally did not plan to divulge to the world. When the allegations were made, Kola denied them, feeling that her safety as an American citizen would be at risk. However, when a European newspaper decided to break the story, she was forced to come forward.
And, lastly, to know Kola is to know that there is something very rotten in the Sudan, where at this very moment, a genocide is taking place that easily equals that of Rwanda. Kola's perspective is unique in that it is from the inside and she is understandably very angry about what she has witnessed. Expect no censorship when Kola speaks.
“I don't think the average African is in a position to appreciate the background of Kola Boof's story, given the general Arabophile brainwashing that prevents Africans from seeing Arab behavior towards Africans for what it has been for two thousand years,” Chinweizu said.
Always circling Boof's life story, like a hungry keen-eyed vulture, is the greater story of racism and slavery in the Sudan. Through Kola's autobiography one quickly comes to understand the meaning of the Arabic word “abeed,” which is basically the equivalent of the word “nigger” during slave times in the United States.
The ongoing Darfur Conflict, which began in 2003, is mainly between the Janjaweed, a government-supported militia recruited from local Arab tribes, and the non-Arab peoples of the region. The conflict has been described by the Western media as “ethnic cleansing,” and “genocide.” In September 2004, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated 50,000 deaths in Darfur since the conflict's onset, mostly by starvation. In October, its head gave an estimate of 71,000 deaths by starvation and disease alone between March and October 2004. A recent British Parliamentary Report estimates that over 300,000 people have died so far.
There have also been reports of mass rapes and accounts that many of these rapes were done for a purpose other than violence. It is believed that many of these attackers hoped to impregnate their African victims with “Arab babies,” in order to destroy families from the inside out, for in their culture, a child belongs to the father. More than 1.8 million people had been displaced from their homes. It is reported that 200,000 have fled to neighboring Chad. The UN, prior to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, called the Darfur conflict the world's worst current humanitarian crisis.
When I spoke with Kola, she was quick to explain the often unspoken complexity of what is happening in the Sudan.
“Sudan is an Arab run nation connected to the rest of the Arab world, from which it takes its orders,” Kola said. “The British and the Egyptians were the ones who built Lake Nuba...causing more than 100,000 Nuba people to be removed from the Nuba valley, many of them eventually dying. So how does one trust anything they write about the Sudan, when they [the British] were the colonizer and the ones who left an Arab minority regime in charge of the Sudan?
“And though a man like Hasan al Turabi [a Sudanese leader known for protecting Osama bin Laden in the late 90s] looks like a black man from a distance---it's crucial [to note] what he actually looks like close up. He is an Arab with very dark skin. Black people are not leading either side, as the Mulatto Arabs take their orders directly from White Arabs and as White Arabs govern the parliament in Sudan. And these people hate Black people more ferociously than any light skinned person.
“The genocide in Darfur and the news reports--in the New York Times for instance, where the charcoal colour of the genocide victims is constantly derided by the Arabs is proof of that. Those paid to do the actual killing are black Muslims. At the root of all antagonisms between Africans and Non-Africans is the issue of color.”
Knowing this, it is therefore not surprising that the Sudan is also known for its modern-day slavery of black Africans. Back in 1996, Lawrence Tung of the Sudanese Human Rights Monitor said, “In the 'mentality of the enslaver,' Southern Sudanese are seen as 'less worthy' individuals whose rights can be violated at random.”
There are no public auctions in the Sudan; there is no systematic branding, as was done to slaves in the United States. However black women and children, particularly from Southern Sudanese communities, have been seized in violent raids on villages by fighters armed by the government. These women and children are forced into servitude on farms or in houses, often sexually exploited, and sometimes sold by their captors.
In her book, Kola writes about witnessing this slavery with her own eyes as a child in the 70s. In one of several instances, she saw slaves: “Two boys, around ten and eleven and blacker than crude oil, were chained on either side of the back door of Abu Fayid Ali's house…”
“Where are the parents of the Dinka children,” she asked her father.“Probably at the bottom of a ditch,” he replied.
In the last ten years, tens of thousands have been enslaved. Most of these people are of the Dinka and Nuer people. The majority of the enslavers are believed to be government-armed militias from groups like the Rezeigat and Meseriya people who belong to the Baggara, cattle-herding Arabic-speaking people who live in the neighboring regions of Kordofan and Darfur. Other members of the “Popular Defense Force” (PDF) militias, as well as some regular army officers, may also be involved.
“I remember as a small child being taught this in school,” Kola writes in Diary of a Lost Girl. “Being told that black people are inferior to Whites (Arabs being classified as white in Sudan, not Caucasoid). We were taught that the whitest Arab was the highest and most beloved 'son' in the eyes of Allah…and that the darkest, most charcoal coloured 'son' was the last remnant of Asli-Nalla's evil impurity as a woman (she, charcoal black Asli-Nalla, being the Cushitic-Ethiopian mother of the entire human race.)”
The issue of race and colour in the United States is young compared to that of the Sudan. And this is the world that Kola emerged from and this is the world that colours her work. It is no wonder she roars her words instead of speaks them. I am reminded of the African proverb, “Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.” Has that day finally come for the black people of Sudan?
