Author: Edwin Okong'o

Edwin Okong’o is not your typical, stereotypical African. He is a storyteller by any medium necessary™. Okong'o is an award-winning journalist, humorist, satirist and memoirist. He received his master’s degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied radio, newspaper, magazine, and online multimedia storytelling and editing. Okong’o’s journalistic work, provocative commentaries, and stand-up comedy performances have appeared in numerous media across the world. He is the winner of several honors, including a Webby Award for his short documentary, "Kenya: Sweet Home, Obama", which he made for the PBS program, Frontline.

Episode 99: ‘Slaves for Peanuts’ reveals the dirty history behind one of the world’s most delicious snacks

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We speak with Jori Lewis about her new book, Slaves for Peanuts, a story about the role the crop played in slavery and colonization of Africa. Lewis is an award–winning African American journalist who writes about agriculture and the environment. Her reports have appeared on PRI’s The World and in Discover Magazine, Pacific Standard, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She is also a contributing editor of Adi, a literary magazine about global politics. In 2018, Lewis received the prestigious Whiting Grant for Creative Nonfiction. She splits her time between Illinois and Senegal, where she joined us from for this episode. 

Episode 96: ‘Same forest, different monkeys’ in 2022 Kenyan elections

~ Edwin Okong'o

Kenyan lawyer, Cindano wa Gakuru, talks about the “different monkeys” fighting it out in the “same forest” that is the Kenyan elections, which are scheduled for August 9. Wa Gakuru is an attorney who specializes in various areas of law, including land, the environment, intellectual property, and natural resource management. He is involved in a number of initiatives in science and technology, and national agricultural policies.

Episode 94: White woman kills Nigerian American boyfriend; some Black women blame him

~ Edwin Okong'o

Christian Obumseli, a 27-year-old Nigerian American, was killed in Miami by his white girlfriend, Courtney Clenney. Immediately, police and U.S. media started hinting at “self defense.” That was expected. What was shocking was seeing so many Black women say that he deserved it for dating a white woman — as if it’s unheard of for a Black woman to kill a man.

Episode 88: How a young Ugandan brought down the Ponzi schemer who stole from the poor

~ Edwin Okong'o

When Daniel Leinhardt and his family lost all their savings to an international cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme, he decided to go after the Ugandan director of OneCoin scam. He speaks about the scheme that derailed his university education, and how he was pleasantly shocked when Ugandan authorities arrested John Mwangutsya.

Mwangutsya was Uganda’s director of OneCoin, a cryptocurrecy multilevel marketing scheme that defrauded people around the world of $4 billion. OneCoin was founded by Bulgarian-born Ruja Iganatova, who vanished in 2017 when it became apparent that she was defrauding people.