#TenThingsLearnt w/c Jan 13

1. The origin for the word ‘gossip’ was ‘god’ +’ sibb’, referring to a godparent or family friend…

2. …It evolved to mean female friends chatting, particularly during childbirth…

3. … conversations would drift to talking about others… and became ‘gossip’. (Thanks Hanan)

4. Giraffe can run at 65 mph.

5. Alfred Kinsey, who invented the Kinsey sexuality scale, also studied fruit flies.

6. Duck feathers are hydrophobic.

7. Loki, Shiva, Vishnu, Tiresias, Hermaphroditus, Atum, Hapi, Mahu, Ishatar, Lan Cahie - are Gender fluid characters that have been around for centuries. CENTURIES.

8. Accelerating anything to the speed of light would require an infinite amount of energy.

9. In 2023, Novo, the company that makes Ozempic, become the richest company in Europe, with a market cap of $424 billion.

10. In a single month – Oct 2023 – Israel dropped 25,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, equivalent to burning 150,000 tonnes of coal.

#TenThingsLearnt w/c Jan 6

1. Ivy League universities are named so because historically, ivy grew on them.

2. The Georgian language has arguably the toughest consonants clusters like: Gvprtskvniz. It is influenced by the Persian, Arabic, Turkic, Greek & Roman languages.

3. The word serendipity comes the original name for SriLanka, ‘Serendip’.

4. A4, A3, A2 sheets of paper etc have the same ratio… A45 would be large enough to wrap around Earth.

5. 2024 was the hottest year on record.

6. When Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter heard what her father did, she didn’t sleep for five nights; she was too terrified to.

7. By 1954, the fossil fuel industry knew about the potential for its products to disrupt Earth’s climate on a scale significant to human civilization.

8. During WWII, Japan conducted horrendous experiments on human beings for covert biological and chemical warfare…

9. …The victims were mostly Chinese civilians and prisoners of war.

10. There as roughly 32 town and cities in the USA called Lebanon.

#TenThingsLearnt w/c Dec 30

#TenThingsLearnt w/c Dec 30

1. Dominican Republicans claim Haitians used to enslave them - this is not true.

2. The city of London is 1500 yrs older than Genghis Khan.

3. The Ottoman Empire was still around when Walt Disney released his first cartoons.

4. In the 14th century, men accused midwives of being witches because they wanted to dominate the midwifery industry as well.

5. Swifts fly for ten continuous months. They eat, sleep and mate in the air.

6. The Earth isn’t floating, it is falling towards the sun, which is falling towards the center of the galaxy.

7. Rather than face judgement, waves of suicide swept Germany in the final months of WWII. In April, 3,800 people took their own lives…

8. …whole families walked into rivers tied to each other; the kids with rocks in their school bags.

9. Apple seeds contain a natural form of cyanide; half a cup of them is fatal to humans.

10. Fritz Haber was a German Jew who led the first chlorine gas attack killing thousands. He threw an epic party to celebrate his resulting promotion, but his wife shot herself with his gun in protest and died. Fritz created Zyklon A, and died fleeing Nazis on his way to Palestine.

#TenThingsLearnt w/c Dec 23

1. Feral dogs living near Chernobyl are mutating faster than normal.

2. Zar Zar Gabour had nine husbands. With her two other sisters, they had twenty.

3. On average cows in the US produced 30 tokes more milk than cows in Kenya.

4. The surface of the sun is 10,000 degree Fahrenheit. If you move 1000 miles AWAY from the sun the temperature INCREASES to 2mil degrees Fahrenheit.

5. The probe that is orbiting the sun is travelling so fast, its flight from London to New York would take 29 seconds.

6. A tank full molasses exploded in Boston in 1919. It flooded the neighbourhood.

7. King Charles II had Oliver Cromwell hung in Marble Arch, then beheaded. Cromwell had been dead for 3 years.

8. On the 1st of January 1877, Queen Victoria became the ‘Empress of India’ 🙄

9. Israel removed safeguards to protect civilians in airstrikes, allowing officers to kill up to 20 people. Sometimes they killed up to 100.

10. Using modern definitions of Blackness, there is every possibility that Christ was Black.

#TenThingsLearnt w/c Dec 16

1. Hanifa Safia Adan solved Nairobi’s 30 year trash accumulation problem in 2 months.

2. Rubber tyres (80% of which is synthetic rubber) accounts for 78% of the ocean’s microplastic.

3. Jeffery Epstein started his career as a math teacher in New York City.

4. Kenyans are at the forefront for indigenous African Country music.

5. The treaty that created countries was only written in 1648, less than 400 years ago.

6. The carbon market trade has displaced thousands of people in Kenya and Tanzania.

7. “There is no prize to perfection, only and end to pursuit”.

8. The planet Uranus is named after the ancient Greek god Ouranos, Zeus’s grandfather.

9. The French employed West African soldiers to colonise North Africa. This divide and conquer tactic left a legacy of distrust that still hampers African Unity.

10. Eels travel en mass to mate in the Bermuda Triangle. No one has figured out exactly why.

Alfred Fagon.

Last Friday, I won the Alfred Fagon Award for Best new play, Once Upon A Time In Sokoto.

I’ve been working on this play for about five years now, and it’s been one of the most challenging experiences of my writing life, for a number of reasons. Finally placing it before an audience was a humbling moment… hearing the laughter and tears from only a staged reading of a handful of scenes was deeply emotional and affirming. I sincerely hope this play gets to meet an audience one day.

Above all winning The Alfred Fagon Award was a blessing really beyond my wildest dreams. I have never won an award for playwriting – this is the first – and this play specifically dramatises the power of language and literature. I’m so grateful, so SO grateful, to the readers and judging panel for seeing all I was trying to do. I wanna applaud other winners: Ilayda McIntosh, Leanna Benjamin - it was a pleasure to share the evening with you - and all the nominees, longlisted and shortlisted. May your plays find their audiences.

My deepest gratitude goes to my long time partner-in-crime, Kate McGrath and the team at Fuel, my agent, Tanya Tillett, the experts who have guided and facilitated this play, Fatima Kelleher and Zaahida Nabagereka. To Sasha Salmon who held me up when I was most broken by the story, to Daniel Bailey for being my boy; for always being a supportive voice, and to Rufus Norris, Nina Steiger, Indhu Rubasingham and the National Theatre for initially commissioning this play.

Shout out to the actors on the day, Sule, Layo, Toheeb, Antonia, and Natasha for stage directions and Brigitte Adela for directing the reading.

It’s been described as an epic, it is, but fundamentally it a story about an unlikely friendship between a slave and her former owner; two incredible women caught between the fall of the Sokoto Empire and the rise of the British Empire.

I hope it finds a home and y’all get to see it in all its glory.

Photos by Sharon Wallace / AFA.

🙏🏿🙏🏿

#TenThingsLearnt w/ Dec 9

#TenThingsLearnt w/ Dec 9

1. A bakery owner in Chicago discovered that her long time customer was actually her son!

2. Coca-Cola abandoned its goal to reduce single-use plastic.

3. The culture war was a distraction from the class war.

4. Ethiopia, Zambia, Botswana, Lesotho and South Africa all have 13-month calendars.

5. Female bees sting male bees and throw them outta the hive in order to survive the winter.

6. A quarter of the population of Gaza is under 10 years old.

7. Queen Elizabeth refused to allow Israeli officials inside Buckingham Palace.

8. Hippos spend more time in the air than we thought. They run so fast they can be airborne for up to 15% of their stride cycle.

9. Woolly mammoths were roaming the earth when the great pyramids were under construction.

10. Japan have developed a new kind of biodegradable plastic that disintegrates in ocean water in a few hours!

#TenThingsLearnt w/c Dec 2

#TenThingsLearnt w/c Dec 2

1. The Oxford Union voted that Israel was an apartheid state committing genocide.

2. The great pacific garbage patch is bigger than Peru; a thick soup of fragmented plastic.

3. 250,000 tonnes of plastics are in the ocean. We all are literally waste-men.

4. People who identify as White make 7% of the global human population.

5. There are 300 types of Octopuses.

6. George R. R. Martin was a screenwriter before he became a novelist.

7. The belief that we are living in a simulation grows more and more plausible.

8. For 150 years, Latin Americans paid Europeans to “breed out” they’d darker skinned citizens.

9. More enslaved people were taken to the US from Angola than anywhere else.

10. 350,000 African artefacts, including human remains, were found in Cambridge Uni’s archives.

#TenThingsLearnt w/c Nov 25

#TenThingsLearnt

1. The first computers were built to calculate distance for more precise artillery fire.

2. ‘Syncopate’ can also mean ‘to shorten’.

3. Nicole Kidman physique is amazing at 50! Turns out, she 57!

4. Britain still has 14 overseas territories.

5. The FBI admitted to having no legal basis for rejecting the warrant for the war criminal’s arrest.

6. “A Karen with a Dick is a Drake.” #KenDrake #Liemore

7. Black women in Europe were once banned from wearing their hair out in public.

8. Unwashed pillows have 17,000 times more bacteria than toilets.

9. No one in The Importance Of Being Earnest, is actually called Earnest.

10. Lin Manuel Miranda wrote parts of Moana (part 1).

#TenThingsLearnt w/ 18Nov

1. The Pope believes what’s happening has the characteristics of a Genocide.

2. China has 230 times the military shipbuilding capacity of the United States.

3. ‘Multipolarity’ is a newish term in foreign policy, and refers to a world with multiple super powers.

4. Bob Marley’s song lyrics in “war” are almost entirely taken from Haile Selassie I’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Oct 4th, 1963.

5. Water Buffalo can hold their breath for up to five minutes and swim underwater.

6. Rainbows are created when sunlight passes through water droplets in the atmosphere causing the light to split and bend. This is called refraction.

7. The language spoken in SIMS is an actual language.

8. Haitian French differs from Quebec French, both differ from Congolese French.

9. Resistance training can completely eradicate ‘menopause belly’.

10. Daniel Hannan aka ‘Lord Hannan of Kingsclere’ is a man of questionable agendas.

#TenThingsLearnt w/c Nov 11

1. Uppercase letters are called that because they were stored in the upper drawer of the printing press. Lowercase letters… lower drawer.

2. Trump is so bad at business he bankrupted HIS OWN casinos.

3. China has more triple A star students than America HAS students.

4. The English word ‘Accent’ comes from the Latin words ‘ad’ & ‘cantos’ which mean ‘song added to speech’.

5. The word 'miniature' came from the Latin word ‘miniare’ - the lead paint used by artists.

6. The body fails to make distinctions between reality and imagination; it records the effects of both. Regardless, the body keeps the score.

7. Instagram reduces visibility of images with lots of text.

8. Back in the day, there was beef between Tottenham and Hackney NOT Peckham - got this wrong on stage.

9. The Pacific Ocean covers a third of earth’s surface. The Atlantic covers a fifth.

10. Mikey J Asante scored Kneecap.

#TenThingsLearnt w/c Nov 4

#TenThingsLearnt w/c Nov 4

1. Sky Tv is the ghetto. They don’t care about customers.

2. Many tactical missiles are more powerful than the nuke dropped on Hiroshima.

3. Chess champions burn upwards of 6,000 calories a day during tournaments — sitting still & thinking.

4. ‘Recrudescence’ means the return of something terrible after a time of reprieve.

5. America *thinks like Kamala, but *feels like Trump. Feelings Trump thought.

6. The ten richest people in the world became 64B richer the day Trump won.

7. Babies are small nuclear reactors.

8. Psychedelic drugs open up the brain on a cellular level and could be used to cure stroke patients.

9. Every year, people gather in Nigeria to hold a candle vigil for Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Nine.

10. A cloud weighs a million tonnes.