#TenThingsLearnt Feb 10

1. Women from different cultures have different symptoms for the menopause! 😳🩸

2. The asteroid flying towards Earth has a 2% chance of making impact in 2032…

3. …the Countries at risk are: sIndia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Sudan, Nigeria 😳, Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador.

4. One in six people on earth are Indian.

5. One is six people on earth are Chinese.

6. The Norwegian government suppressed the language and culture of the Kven people.

7. Isaac Newton believed the world would end in 2060.

8. Up until recently, Doctors didn’t believe it was possible to have ADHD & Autism simultaneously.

9. Lavatory comes from the verb ‘lave’, which means ‘to wash’.

10. Tesla is suing drivers who complain about their cars after accidents – and winning.

#TenThingsLearnt w/c Feb 3

1. Almost 200 American prisons have closed in the past 20 years. Some have been turned into stylish apartment buildings! 🎉🥳

2. The Wangari Maathai Award for Environmental Leadership is given by various organizations to young environmental activists.

3. Koalas smell like cough syrups and sleep for 18 hours a day.

4. In Oct ‘23, there were 2.3million folks in Gaza. Trump announced wanting to resettle the “1.8million Gazans” remaining to Jordan & Egypt. This means 500,000 people were killed or ‘cleansed’.

5. Sea Otters have favourite rocks and often sleep holding hands.

6. Nelson Mandela Place - in Glasgow - was given that name at the height of the anti apartheid protests, precisely because the South African Consulate was located there. It was expert trolling; it forced their address to become:

The South African Consulate

Nelson Mandela Place

Glasgow, Scotland. 😂✊🏿

7. Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy-sweeping “Not Like Us” is at once a Drake-slaying diss track, a No. 1 single, a West Coast unity anthem, a Kamala Harris rally singalong, a World Series fight song, and a bar mitzvah dance floor party-starter.

8. Chang and Eng Bunker were co- joined twins fused at their sternum and livers. They were brought to the US as a circus act, settled in North Carolina, married sisters and fathered 21 children.

9. Temperatures at the north pole soared more than 20C above average, crossing the threshold for ice to melt.

10. Some Inuits believe the northern lights are the spirits of hunted animals.

#TenThingsLearnt w/c Jan 27

1. Kwame Nkrumah was on the cover of Time magazine, 9 February 1953.

2. Many Californian homeowners who don’t believe in climate change have insurance policies from companies that do. 🤷🏿‍♂️

3. German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who was vice president of the German Colonial Society told Ben-Gurion that Israel was a “fortress of the west”.

4. Knife crime is predominantly portrayed as a problem in Black and brown communities, but 69% of perpetrators are white.

5. Portugal was the first country in the world to decriminalise all drugs. 😎

6. The steam from erupting volcanoes sometimes melts the wings off birds. 😕

7. Denisovans are recently discovered *different breed of humans! They mated with Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.

8. AI designed computer chips that the human minds can’t understand. But they haven’t been built. Yet. 😳

9. The tiny planarian flatworm can regrow its entire body from just a tiny silver of tissue. 😃

10. Gay military personnel could still be jailed right up until 1994. The military thought they would have “a substantial and negative effect on morale, and consequently, on the fighting power and operational effectiveness of the armed forces” 🙄

#TenThingsLearnt w/c Jan 20

1. The new quantum computer chip, Willow, can perform a computation task in under 5 mins, that’d take the current fastest supercomputer 10 septillion years to complete. That's 10 with 24 zeroes, a timeframe that exceeds the age of the universe.

2. Grapes and apples can grow on the same tree - a combination fruit tree - which is created by grafting grapes and apple together.

3. Tik Tok does not pay content creators in Africa.

4. The Roman Salute is just another name for Hitler’s salute. Both are fascist. Besides, there is no evidence from the Roman art and paintings that survive, that ancient Romans ever used that gesture.

5. News Group Newspapers hired more than 100 private investigators, over 35,000 times in 16 years to snoop on Prince Harry.

6. Tunisia was the first Arab and Muslim country to abolish slavery on 23 January 1846. Their leader, Ahmad I ibn Mustafa, closed slave markets, banned their export and freedom all slaves born in Tunisia.

7. Over the last two years, Tunisia’s current president, Kais Saied, dismantled their democracy, jailed political opponents, crushed the independent judiciary and the news media, and rewrote the Constitution in his favour.

8. Kais Saied claimed that sub-Saharan African migrants were part of a secret plan to turn Tunisia into “a purely African country with no affiliation to Arab and Islamic nations.” Immediately, Black folk in Tunisia, students and work were evicted, fired, assaulted, robbed or forced into hiding.

9. Marcus Garvey, was falsely convicted of mail fraud more than 100 years ago. Joe Biden posthumously pardoned him.

10. Ken Saro-Wiwa was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

#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.