US-based screenwriter Peres Owino makes a case for ‘the real African story’

African history suffers from a lack of proper documentation as vital information about the continent’s kingdoms was wiped out during the brutal decades of colonialism.

This is something that bothered Peres Owino for a long time—until she decided to do something about it. Like many writers, researchers and historians who want to tell the authentic story of the continent’s past and link it to the present from an African perspective, Peres knew it would not be easy.

But it has been a gratifying journey so far for the Kenyan-born screenwriter, who is based in America.

One of her most recent works is a screenplay (script) for a documentary series, African Queens. The first instalment, which premiered on the streaming service Netflix on February 15, is about Njinga, a legendary leader who ruled over what is largely present-day Angola. African Queens: Njinga is narrated by American actress and Red Table Talk host Jada Pinkett-Smith—the wife of film star Will Smith.

“There is nobody who is alive who saw Njinga of Ndongo who ruled in the 1600s. What we write is based on what we know and talking to people who can validate the information that we have gathered. We were two African writers, Nnenne Iwuji and me. We read widely about different African cultures and constantly find similarities between most of them,” she told the Sunday Nation.

The docuseries tells the story of Njinga, who became the first female ruler of Ndongo, which is present-day Angola. After a long, fierce battle with the Portuguese against slave trade, she became the only African leader to be recognised by European rulers in power as a “female king”.

Royal succession

By the end of her life, she had secured a safe, independent kingdom for her people. The royal succession continued with three other women. Eventually, European forces overwhelmed the continent. Ndongo fell to the Portuguese and became known as Angola. Njinga’s story was diminished and buried until the 1960s when a group of Angolans fighting for independence claimed Njinga as their own revolutionary.

At least six million slaves were exported from Angola alone between 1525 and 1866; some leaders had to sell off some of their people and they, too, eventually got sold off. After a long struggle for freedom, the Portuguese occupation of Angola finally came to an end in 1975.

“The pressure has never been let off the African continent. The story shows a brutal time in African history. Some people ask why Africans did not do anything. Imagine if today all the powerful nations decided to come back and recolonise Africa, what would we do?” says Peres.

The show also brings up the understanding of how powerful African monarchs were before colonisation and in the present. One of the storytellers in the series is Queen Diambi Kabatusuila who is the current monarch of the Bakwa Luntu People of Kasaï in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“Queen Diambi, who is almost like a present-day Njinga, was one of our advisors to clarify most of the information that we did not understand about the African monarchs,” Peres says.

In the series, Queen Diambi says: “Our stories still have to be told because most of the time, they have not been told by us. They have been told by others for us.”

Peres commends the production companies, Nutopia (UK) and Westbrook (US), for specifically asking for African writers for the show. “These are great opportunities for us to show foreigners how we see ourselves, instead of them writing about how they view us. I do not think people really know Africans. When we look at movies like Black Panther and Woman King, it feels like a second-hand gaze of how we depict Africans, which most often feels unreal.”

She says there is no shortage of queens and leaders in Africa to write about, but it is likely that not all of them are known. “In East Africa, for example, we had a queen called Mwana Mkisi from the Swahili who founded an empire. In southern Africa, we have Queen Nandi of the Zulu who was Shaka Zulu’s mother. The next season of African Queens will feature Cleopatra of Egypt. If you look at the African continent, we have 54 countries right now because of borders and boundaries drawn up by colonisers. If we removed them, there must have been a lot of kingdoms that existed and the issue is that we might not have the documentation about their existence because the information was passed down through oral storytelling. We are at risk of losing them completely,” says Peres.

Translation hurdle

She believes context and meaning are, to a great extent, lost in translation whenever any African language is translated into English for viewers. Meanwhile, countries like South Korea, known for their K-drama series, air their shows in Korean with English subtitles and still pull millions of viewers from all over the world. “I am currently writing shows in Dholuo (the Luo language) set in Kenya. I want to feel like I am at home. There is something beautiful and lyrical about hearing Africans speak in our native tongues. There is also a need to preserve our languages. I enjoy watching foreign films and shows, listening to how raw emotions and expressions are communicated in native languages.”

Peres’ journey into writing started when she was only 10. By the age of 17, she had written about three 400-page stories when she was at Loreto High School in Limuru. Later, she moved to Wisconsin, USA, to study social change and development but secretly did a double major in theatre and arts without her parents’ knowledge. She worked three jobs to help pay for the second degree. “I am an actor, a stand-up comedian and a writer. I started writing at a really young age and still have all those books. Hopefully, I can turn them into films or television shows,” she says, showing piles of old exercise books.

With only $10 in her pocket, Peres moved to Los Angeles in California to pursue her career in theatre and arts as she lived off a friend’s sofa for some time.

Her first job was scooping ice cream at Universal Studios where she hoped to work one day. She was so close yet so far from living her dream.

“I was so miserable. I had no cell phone and called my mother through a landline using a calling card. She freaked out when I told her what I did, then told me to pack my things and go to my sister who was studying in Philadelphia. I refused and did not call her until I had my own place and a car. Soon after, I moved to a hostel where they gave you free food if you had a job and worked for four hours. I lived like this for four years until I got my own apartment then finally bought a car. I got laid off at some point but could not give up. All through, I was writing and sending scripts hoping that one would go through. Finally, one of the scripts I worked on for nine years landed in the hands of Taraji P. Henson, an American film star, who produced it into a film,” she says.

The movie, Seasons of Love, was released in 2014 and nominated for a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Image award for outstanding writing in a motion picture in 2015. “It coincided with the release of a documentary that I directed and acted in called Bound. It won several awards such as the Women In Film Lena Sharpe Award at the Seattle International Film Festival, the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, and the Best Film Directed by a Woman of Color Award at the African Diaspora Film Festival in New York,” she says.

The documentary Bound: Africans VS African Americans, which features American actor Isaiah Washington and Kenyan-American actor Benjamin Onyango, addresses the tensions between continental-born Africans and African-Americans using personal testimonials and historical experiences to expose the rift between the two and what binds them.

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