I start knowing her after the first news of the death of Osama, Bin Laden,
and today when i was lookinh to different news on the internet i found this interview of her.
Syracuse Adams:
Why didn’t you want the real name of your children’s father revealed?
Kola Boof:
Only he can answer that question.
Syracuse Adams:
Neither of your sons is by Osama Bin Laden?
Kola Boof:
Absolutely not, and I’m not a cannibal. I’ve never eaten human flesh as an SPLA member in London recently claimed. I have not lied about any of my involvement working missions for the SPLA, nor would any SPLA personnel in Washington D.C. know what those missions entailed and the truth about where I live is nobody’s business but mine.
Syracuse Adams:
Why do so many reporters, especially white males like Peter Bergen and Dan Billin, have this obsession with discrediting you? You’re so obscure in my mind; you don’t have any real power, yet I’ve read messages by these gentlemen that indicated they absolutely hate you with a passion—Dan Billin told an associate of mine that you’re a “Jew Loving Palestinian Basher”, a “promoter of homosexuality” and wrote very crude remarks about your sexuality to various people—why is it so important to destroy you?
Kola Boof:
Many Democrats fear that my story helps Republicans to win black votes by focusing on terrorism, and in addition to that, the Oil companies who make their fortune in Sudan and many wealthy Arab American businessmen in America want me silenced—they can’t control me. Whether I’m obscure or not—they pay journalists to trash me. There is a fear that Black Americans are going to read in the books of this African woman, be influenced to support Israel and to care about women’s issues. I’m also seen as being against assimilation. Even the U.S. government has complained that my image is “too black”.
Syracuse Adams:
A friend of mine who works at “Good Morning America” says they invited you to be on but that you’ve stopped taking interview requests from white reporters. Is that true?
Kola Boof:
No comment. (Hand gesture)
Syracuse Adams:
I have to read my notes here—Since the order for you to be beheaded was issued by Sudanese officials in 2003 in Khartoum, a fact that is backed up by a lengthy U.N. report—your identity has been very mysterious to people—what do you say to reporters who’ve been digging for something to destroy you with and complain that you’re either linked with too many identities or that you don’t exist at all?
Kola Boof:
To protect myself and my children I’ve had to use all types of assumed identities that the government provided for me—on different paper work, they listed me as different people. I can’t go to the bank or to a car dealership as “Kola Boof” when there are Muslim Extremists and Arab-American people in this society who want to hurt me. I’m not trying to be secretive or mysterious, but I had to protect myself and my children and what I’m doing is normal for political activists—it’s just that under scrutiny from a hostile media, it can be used against you as if you’re trying to hide something. My birth name is Naima Bint Harith and I come from the Sudan, and the fact is, you can’t work for NBC, SONY Pictures and for publishers and not be a real identifiable person—I am Naima Bint Harith, an American citizen born in Sudan, adopted and raised in America, and that is who I am.
Syracuse Adams:
You referred earlier to your autobiography as the dirty truth. It’s called “Diary of a Lost Girl” and it’s finally being released in the United States next week by New York’s Seaburn Publishing Group. Kam Williams, who is a very respected film and book critic from Princeton chose your book as the best book of 2006, and let me just say Kola—that even though I’m not convinced that everything in the book is true—I still must admit that your autobiography is the best autobiography I have ever read in my life. It absolutely floored me. So why do you call it the dirty truth?
Kola Boof:
Well, because my writing doesn’t bring me peace. The truth never sets me free—it causes me to be vilified, persecuted, demonized and lied on—but never because I write fiction, but because I write truth. Organizations don’t threaten your life or pay journalists to manufacture “dirt” about you for writing fiction—they only come to destroy you when you’re telling the truth about some issue and when you’re reaching the masses with that truth. My autobiography is a book that exposes very deep and long-repressed truths about the enslavement and genocide of the Dinka, Nuer and other charcoal people in South Sudan, about the evils of Arab Muslim oppression and terrorism against the entire world, and about the suffering of authentic black women and girls in both Africa and in white supremacist cultures.
Syracuse Adams:
What is happening in Sudan right now and where’s it going to end?
Kola Boof:
It’s impossible to say where it’s going to end, but the country has gone totally to hell. Allah is ashamed of Sudan, because the Arab Muslim government is practicing genocide and every other inhumanity—nobody in the West really cares or something drastic would be done. I’ve used my entire life to fight for the Sudan, but I’m only a woman and I’m silenced and not listened to—many of the leaders are accepting money and bribes. They aren’t really fighting for the liberation of the Southern people anymore, so it’s my prayer that the South will secede in 2011 and become its own country. Whatever happens, we can’t possibly be ruled over by the Arab Muslim world any longer. They are the Satan of this planet and they are destroying Sudan, Somalia and pouring propaganda money into many other parts of Africa. As an African mother, I pray we declare war against the Arab world.
Syracuse Adams:
The first time I ever heard about you, it was on the web blog of gay activist Keith Boykin where you seemed to be a regular member. Some of your detractors complain that while campaigning against interracial unions, you vigorously promote homosexuality. Is that true?
Kola Boof:
I’m not against interracial unions—I’ve been in several. I just believe that most blacks who engage them do so for every reason but love—most blacks are seeking the status of whiteness and in doing so, affirm the supremacy of whiteness and help to weaken and erase black people. If you are proud to be an African and proud to black, as I am, then that matters, and yes, I’m in love with human beings who happen to be homosexual if that’s what you meant. I love all human beings contrary to those who think I’m racist. I make it a point to acknowledge the humanity and suffering of all human beings, including gay people in my work, and I always will. Everyone who’s picked on, I fight for.
Syracuse Adams:
Are you gay?
Kola Boof:
No, and I think my autobiography covers my sexuality and sex life in extraordinary detail, but I do think my life would have been easier if I could have been a lesbian, and I’ve always wished I was a man so I could knock the crap out of these men who constantly pick on me like Billin and Peter Bergen. (Laughs)
Syracuse Adams:
Do you still see a psychiatrist?
Kola Boof:
Sure. I think it’s healthy for people to always be in counseling, and because of things that have happened to me in my childhood, I will always be mentally damaged. I’m not ashamed of that. I’ve achieved more in my life than most people ever do.
Syracuse Adams:
Who are people that you really admire in the world? I mean…Barack Obama? The Dixie Chicks? Who does Kola Boof look up to?
Kola Boof:
It’s really impossible to name everybody, but I greatly admire the Nigerian scholar Chinweizu, the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, and Derrick Bell is my hero. I patterned myself after Nawal El Saadawi, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. I admire Sister Souljah, the writer Marita Golden, Lauryn Hill and Gloria Steinem. We already mentioned Keith Boykin, who’s incredibly brave and important. I have powerfully spiritual best friends like Alicia Banks and Ajowa Ifetayo, and I would be dead without women like them holding me up. There’s a filmmaker, Raoul Peck, which I love and appreciate so much. I look up to my Black American parents, and of course, even though I’m not a Christian, I read the Bible a lot, because it gives me peace of mind. I think Jesus Christ was a genius.
Syracuse Adams:
What about other black women writers and activists—how have people like Bell Hooks, Maya Angelou and Alice Walker reacted to you?
Kola Boof:
I have no idea. I would assume they have very mixed, conflicting opinions about me, because my views about being a black woman come from slightly foreign roots, and then there’s all the controversy that constantly surrounds me, so I’m really a loner. I think Marita Golden is the only one who’s publicly acknowledged I exist, though I’ve never spoken with her, but I do have close friendships with black male writer-activists like Derrick Bell, Molefi Kete Asante, Joe Madison, Keidi Awadu and Kalamu Yaa Salaam. I think Black American women writers and African women writers, alike, are sometimes put off by my aggressive flamboyance, because I’m the black woman they’ve always written about rather than a product of academia, yet I probably seem out of control to them. But I do remember as a little girl feeling that they never took things far enough—the messages were always there, but they were too polite. I really wanted Alice Walker to bash Tony Brown in the head with a brick and I always wished Oprah Winfrey would produce a movie starring a sexy beautiful young dark skinned black woman and give Halle Berry a rest. That’s the image we need.
Syracuse Adams:
You really make a distinction between dark Black women and Mulatto women.
Kola Boof:
Of course I do. I’m so sick of authentic black women being invisible and standing in the background while these mixed race tramps get nothing but hype. It’s time for a change—why does “feminist sisterhood” always put me, the blackest, at the bottom? I’d rather have my own damned village where only I exist than pretend a black woman can be represented by a mulatto. It’s degrading and black women are tired of this system!
Syracuse Adams:
O.K., moving along…I was shocked when I heard that you actually ghost write for soap operas. I read something about you causing scandal at “Days of Our Lives”. How in the world do they match an eccentric foreign personality like yours into the white bread world of soap operas?
Kola Boof:
I’m not anything like the media portrays me, Syracuse—Stephen Wyman thought I was a very sweet person, not a “black militant”, and he was impressed by the power and imagination of my writing. Ken Corday complimented me on a bible I wrote for the show—I certainly did a lot more than write two episodes, but I’m no longer with “Days of Our Lives”, and to be perfectly honest with you, I’m really sort of angry right now because it’s the best soap on daytime and NBC is planning to cancel it.
Syracuse Adams:
Isn’t that the one with the hour glass? I remember that show all the way back when I was in preschool. Kola, did I touch a nerve—you look really upset.
Kola Boof:
Yeah I am, and let me just say something—Kevin Reilly needs to be strung up by his balls and lashed with extension chords if he really believes people don’t want to see soap operas. It’s these stupid executives and these ancient relics producing and writing who don’t realize that the soap format has to be updated to compete with cable and pop culture, it has to mutate into a hipper more accessible vehicle for the 21st century—the same quirky relevance that drives “Grey’s Anatomy” could be distilled to make daytime soaps competitive with cable. I mean honestly—how in the hell have they never done any stories about breast implants, pot smoking, feminist political sex—meaning young career women who think it’s perfectly fine to share a bed with two men at the same time, reverse racism against whites—that could be a compelling storyline with an intelligent black woman like me writing it, man-sharing or exploring for instance the dislike between white women and black women in society.
How about a black woman who doesn’t want her black son dating a dark skinned black girl? Why is real life not being utilized on the daytime soaps? You can’t compete with a hundred fifty cable channels and do the same predictable boring ass baby-switching storylines over and over again; you have to have very emotional love stories. You need innovative social ideas mixed in with traditional storytelling, and you have to use the veterans, the core family of a show to build a solid foundation from. How in the hell can I not bring back the Hortons or the Bauers? When I was a kid, I could give a damn about the teen soap characters—I wanted to see Mac and Rachel, Raven Swift, John and Marlena, the Hortons, Victor Newman. I thought the best shows were the ones with innovative chance-taking writers like Agnes Nixon, Harding Lemay and Douglass Marland.
The networks just don’t allow that kind of vision anymore, and then when they get someone who has a “vision” rather than a plot—someone such as myself who nobody can deny is passionate and can write—they fired me over some camel-crap. Bible belt Christians fear I may be hiding Osama Bin Laden’s love child and my name looks funny on the credits—why shouldn’t it? I’m a Flintstone, Ok?—oh, and the sponsors don’t like me. Then they hire me at another network to write in secret…ghost write us some ideas Kola…but writing ideas is not real writing—it’s sending memos all day.
Syracuse Adams:
You’re like Toni Morrison. You’re really a soap fan, aren’t you?
Kola Boof:
I wish to God somebody would let me have six good months as head writer of “Guiding Light” or “One Life to Life”. Hell, I’d even work on “Passions”!—it’s time for soaps to kick cable’s ass, but the networks are run by people who lack imagination and are too financially comfortable and too normal. They’re out of touch; they only know how to ‘copy’and not create. They’re afraid to get a good controversy going which Rosie O’Donnell has proven is what brings ratings, they’re not hungry. Stephen Wyman is one of the few I’ve met who wants to be cutting edge. He fought for me, but his hands were tied—one good public scandal and I was kicked to the curb. Can you imagine that? A real life soap character turned away from writing a soap opera because she’s shocking, different and interesting to the press. MTV would have never let me go! I swear to God—if they cancel “Days of Our Lives”, I will never forgive Kevin Reilly. Never! …
Syracuse Adams:
(Laughing)…
Kola Boof:
You know, that’s the good thing about being a bestselling author and having an audience in other arenas, I get to say what I want and the network executives can’t hurt me. Let’s move on, though, before I piss off Steve and Ken, who I’m sure do not want me saying the things I’m saying about Kevin and won’t like reading this.
Syracuse Adams:
O.K., let’s talk about Michael Richards and the radio listeners who were upset that you defended him using the “N” word.
Kola Boof:
I didn’t defend him using the “N” word. What I said is that as a Black woman and mother of black sons, I’m more offended by the blatant colorism on BET and the self-hatred that causes black rappers and black male media figures to demonize, disrespect, disallow and lie on black women—yet they have the nerve to castigate Michael Richards and demand that I should be more disgusted by Michael Richards than I am by Michael Jackson, Montel Williams, color struck whining ass Taye Diggs or Ward Connerly. What Michael Richards did in that comedy club didn’t bother me one bit, because I’m not a “N”—the word doesn’t describe me, and I can relate to being out of control and cursing people out and using the wrong language to do so. Richards was wrong, but this nation went overboard in punishing him, and that’s my honest opinion, because if we really had respect for the humanity of black people, we’d cancel BET and stop supporting these self-hating black men who really do hate and undermine black people.
Syracuse Adams:
Do black women writers hate black men?
Kola Boof:
No—black men hate their damned selves. We’re just angry because we’re so disappointed in the destruction black men bring to black culture, and then blame it on the white man. It’s tiresome as hell, but the only man I’ve ever loved is black and I’m grateful for our two sons. The real problem in African-American culture is the colorist hatred that black men have for black women and children, but because of sexism, that fact goes overlooked.
Syracuse Adams:
What’s something about you that people don’t know?
Kola Boof:
That it wasn’t me who revealed that I had been with Osama Bin Laden—it was a group of British journalists at the London Guardian who kept threatening to expose my connection to Somi (Bin Laden), and anyone can look that up online. I was ashamed for people to find out, and I truly wanted to take that secret to my grave. As a young woman working in North Africa and living alone, I had to sleep with a lot of men that I didn’t like and didn’t agree with, because I was poor and I was powerless, but having the world know about me and Osama has done nothing but destroy my life and hinder my career. I am a literary writer who has no formal education—I don’t come from an academic background as Z.Z. Packer and Zadie Smith do—so the odds were stacked against me to begin with and being the mistress of the man who blew up the publishing capitol of the world, New York City, doesn’t help. The industry really despises me.
Syracuse Adams:
Derrick Bell, the famous writer and Professor at New York University, told the London Mail on Sunday that your books “Long Train to the Redeeming Sin” and “Flesh and the Devil” are legitimate literary classics that are simply being ignored. I’ve heard many academics and black book lovers praise the beauty and power of your work, but when the media’s trashing you, there’s almost no mention made of the actual books you write, so I just want to mention that you are, without a doubt, a very gifted writer. I definitely put you in the same category with Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Edwidge Danticat.
Kola Boof:
Thanks so much, Syracuse.
Syracuse Adams:
Last question—who’s your pick to win the Super Bowl?
Kola Boof:
(Smiles) Uhm…my sons want The Chicago Bears.
Syracuse Adams:
Thanks Kola. Make sure to pick up Kola Boof’s autobiography, “Diary of a Lost Girl”—it’s on sale at Amazon.Com and it’s worth every penny.
This article originally appeared in BAHIYAH WOMEN'S MAGAZINE, February 2007.*Syracuse Adams is the author of the forthcoming novel “Porcuppine Holiday” and has written for JET and the National Enquirer.
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