I Didn’t Set Out to Write a Book. I Set Out to Tell a Story.
There is something quietly powerful about being in a room full of people who understand what it means to carry two worlds inside you, and to create from that in-between space.
On June 24th, I had the honour of being one of three voices at “Made in Diaspora: Art, Between Worlds and Cultures,” an event by Diaspora Creatives in Vienna that put African diaspora creatives at the centre of the story. Alongside Harriet Kahuzu Hala, Founder of FAB L’Style Magazine, and Hannah Acquah, Founder of TKC Africa and Helmet and Armour, I shared a narrative that I rarely talk about publicly; the origin of how I became a storyteller.
It Started With DStv and No Television at School
I grew up as a millennial in Nigeria with access to DStv at home; satellite television, full of movies, series, stories from across the world. But at school, there was no television. No screen. No way to access any of that.
So I became the screen.
I would watch films at home, absorb them; the plot, the characters, the tension, the humour, and then go to school and retell them to my classmates. Verbally. From memory. In my own words. It became a way for us to unwind, to laugh, to escape for a moment from the pressures of academic life. And it became, without me knowing it at the time, the foundation of how I think about storytelling: not as performance, but as connection. Not as showing off, but as sharing.
I had no idea I was building a skill. I was just a girl who loved stories and had classmates who wanted to hear them.
When a Professor Said My Work Was “Not Pre-Colonial”
Years later, when I had written and published Biking Through Africa & Beyond, I encountered something unexpected. A professor reviewed my work and noted that it was not pre-colonial, that it did not fit the typical narrative expected of African writers. It was not what the tradition anticipated.
At first, I didn’t know how to receive that.
But sitting with it, I began to understand that this was not a critique. It was a description. My work was shaped by a girl who grew up on DStv movies and schoolyard storytelling, who biked across continents, who lived in Vienna, who straddled Nigeria and Austria and the wide space between them. Of course it didn’t fit the expected mould. It was never supposed to.
The diaspora experience, when honestly told — cannot be pre-colonial. It is something new. It is memory and migration and modernity, woven together.
What “Made in Diaspora” Meant to Me
The Diaspora Creatives event on June 24th was professionally filmed and photographed for a documentary — which means that for the first time, this origin story of mine is on record. Not as a footnote in a biography, but as a spoken, witnessed narrative, shared in community.
That matters to me.
Because so often, African women in the diaspora are invited to speak about our work, our research, our organisations, our books, our advocacy, but rarely about the how of who we became. The school corridors where we found our voices. The small, unremarkable habits that turned into something we carried across borders.
I left the evening reminded that the most powerful stories are not always the polished ones. Sometimes the most powerful story is the one about a girl retelling a movie she watched the night before, to a group of classmates who just needed something to smile about.
That girl became a speaker. A researcher. An author. An advocate.
She became me.
Benedicta Apuamah is a global health advocate, author of “Biking Through Africa & Beyond,” SRHR researcher, and founder of the Global Diaspora Girls Foundation (GDGF). She is a 2024 Science Speed Talk Winner at the Geneva Health Forum and speaks internationally on menstrual health, climate justice, and the rights of women and girls.
Follow her work at www.benedictaapuamah.com
