How race became inscribed on our skins

Kenya: In the clear prose of her semi-fictionalised autobiographies, the late Maya Angelou powerfully communicated her experiences of racism and sexism.  She performed similarly important work in her appropriately unadorned, hopeful verse.

 By adopting the ‘life writing’ approach, a form that we know here in Kenya through Mau Mau memoirs and creative publications such as Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About this Place, Angelou was able to represent the often hidden history of African Americans’ experience of racism over her single lifetime, which encompassed both the horrors of lynching and the election of Barrack Obama.