In my mind I am still a little girl from Mayfair, Johannesburg who loves reading and doesn’t mind a bit of writing. But the beginnings of the crow’s forked feet, or its toes, at least, tell me that though the little girl lives within me, I have been thrust into the life of an adult. Words are my solitary defence against the whiles of the world.
I matriculated in 2001 from the Johannesburg Muslim School and went on to complete a Humanities degree in Languages and Literature at the University of South Africa. I majored in English and Arabic but took time as well to twist my tongue around French sensibilities.
I was fascinated by the science of language, its inner workings and how it related to the people we are and so my foray into postgraduate studies was in sociolinguisitics- A branch of linguistics that seeks to explain why people speak the way they do.
While reading towards my postgraduate degree, I had grand plan to save the world by joining the United Nations’ Young Professionals Programme in Paris. Of course they hadn’t banned burqas back then.
I began blogging on a lonely night in December 2007, publishing a couple of posts fully believing Google, like the internet deiety it is, would send adulatory readers my way and when Google failed to deliver, I lost heart with blogging.
Some months later a friend of mine would start blogging and ask why I didn’t have a blog of my own. I was forced to confess that I did indeed have one and in a quirk of fate that I never fail to marvel at, a couple of hours after that confession I received an email from a journalist in Uganda expressing his admiration for the two posts I had published and wondering why I had not continued blogging.
It was sign from above enough.
I began blogging with gusto.
I soon fell into a blogosphere where I met some of the finest young, South Africa writers who, like me, were there to blog for blogging’s sake. And yet, three of the writers I met in that blogging circle are now published authors.
And me?
My UN dreams soon fell to the wayside. One of my earliest ambitions was to be a journalist and through blogging I began writing more and more. I established Makutano Publications, intent on facilitating dialogue between Africans. I wanted desparately for us as run-of-the-mill Africans to have more opportunities to speak to each other about our lives and our world, I wanted to create a space to share experiences and forge a sense of Africaness.
Soon thereafter, I also took over the reigns of Al Huda magazine, a Muslim community publication that had a reputation for being the thinkier of our community publications. With Al Huda I sought firstly to create a space for young creatives to gain experience. I wanted Al Huda to be a publication with a reputation good enough to give you a leg up into the mainstream. My second motive with Al Huda was to get South African Muslims, all sorts of South African Muslims, to speak to each other, to realise that we are more alike than we are different.
After two years steering Al Huda where I could, gaining experience, grey hair and a love for publishing in the process it was time to give over the reigns of the magazine back to its founder.
Forward-wind a few months on and I’m now a “journalist” with The Daily Maverick.