Fatoumata Keïta
One of the storytelling voices behind African Belief — every piece below carries their name because it was researched, framed, and checked in their voice.
Pieces by Fatoumata
Children of Blood and Bone: What the Film Trailer Owes the Òrìṣà
The fight over the Children of Blood and Bone film trailer is not a fight about whether Hollywood got the òrìṣà right. It cannot be.
African Folklore in Contemporary Storytelling: Nigerian Novels and Film
Ben Okri opens The Famished Road with a river that becomes a road, and a road that stays hungry because it was once a river.
Vodou Spirituality and Practice vs. the Hollywood Zombie
A sugar mill turns in the dark. Six men lean into the capstan bar, walking it in a circle, and their faces do not change. One of them slips and goes into the grinder. Nobody stops.
African Folklore in Contemporary Storytelling: Who Narrates
Late in Atlantics, a line of young women leave their beds in a Dakar suburb and walk to the house of the developer who never paid their boyfriends. Their eyes have gone white.
Black Folklore: How West African Stories Traveled and Survived
In one Akan telling recorded in the 1930s, the storyteller opens by taking it all back: We do not really mean, we do not really mean, that what we are about to say is true.
African Mythology in Fiction: Why the New Wave Isn't New
In 1938, a schoolteacher in western Nigeria published a novel in Yoruba about a hunter who walks into a forest thick with spirits and does not come home the same man.
Yoruba Indigenous Religion in Church and Mosque: What Carried Over
The service ran two hours and ten minutes, and I spent most of it with a notebook on my knee, counting. Eleven congregational songs.
Adinkra Symbols in Cloth, on Walls, and on the Kristo Asafo Tomb
At Ntonso, a town north of Kumasi in Ghana's Ashanti Region, a printer works with a stamp cut from a piece of calabash shell.
Netflix Releases, Nollywood, and Africa's 1,700 Screens
The film opens on a compound at dawn. A woman sets a calabash down at the foot of a tree, straightens, and says nothing.