Interest? Not the warm, delightful interest that I didn’t dare hope for, but the cheap, tokenistic interest that you feel when a man strokes your hand and calls you a chocolate African princess. I braced myself for the countless rejections but ended up pausing at what I received instead. I rolled up my sleeves and reached out to people in the elusive publishing industry.

This was new and incredibly confusing because how could I wait for all my hair to turn grey when I needed people to read it now? Well, I couldn’t wait. I wanted to thrust the manuscript in the faces of all the tired commuters I met on the tube and watch them eagerly as they read my story. Then I finished my first book, Daughters of Nri. No, publishing had to wait until I was ready to dye my grey hair purple. I would be able to stomach the hundreds of rejections I was bound to face, or the fact that, at the time, no one around me considered it a viable career choice for an overly ambitious black girl who studied Aeronautical Engineering at university. I believed that when I was ready to retire, I would also be ready to withstand the criticism of my work. I think the sentiment stemmed from Jenny Joesph’s poem, 'When I’m Old', where she details all the things she will do when she is old enough to let go of all her sensibilities and fears such as wearing purple with a red hat that doesn’t go or suit her at all. I wanted to be old, I wanted to be grey, and I wanted to be a little bit crazy. I planned to publish my first book when I retired.

Descendants of the first reni k amayo