To historian and author of ‘The Inevitable Revolutionary: How Thomas Sankara Weaponized Coloniality’, Kai Mora, Sankara ‘embodies the spirit of resistance, prudence, and forward-thinking that the global Black world needs.’
First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.
Our questions are italicized.
What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
Growing up, I was the bookworm in my family. I mainly read fiction—a common motif I loved was the unruly character who becomes a sort of antihero that you develop a curious affinity for, like Holden Caulfield in A Catcher in the Rye. I felt deeply connected to rebellious characters like these and in my adulthood, I find myself drawn to similar motifs in history, finding readings about unlikely African and Black revolutionaries like the Mozambican Samora Michel or Huey P. Newton of the Black Panthers the stuff of my literary elation.
If your life so far was a series of texts, which text (fiction or non-fiction) represents you at this moment?
Paul Beatty’s The Sellout has consistently characterized my life in various ways. Much like the main character of the text, I am constantly mediating intellectual life with the part of me that rejects institutional ways of thinking. This has become increasingly true over the past few years as my academic career has progressed. Recently, as I’ve been contemplating what it means to be an ‘intellectual’ and what use it has to the global Black community, The Sellout has become a key source of observations that influence my evolving opinion on this matter.
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