Lupita Nyong’o Wants to Show You Africa As She Knows It
Throughout her career, Lupita Nyong’o has memorably brought African characters—fictional and real—to life both on screen and on stage. Her portrayals of Nakia in Black Panther, Nakku Harriet in Queen of Katwe, as well as The Girl in Eclipsed on Broadway have earned her critical acclaim, loyal fans, and a place in Hollywood history as the first Black African actress to win an Oscar. Now, Nyong’o is throwing herself into telling real Africans’ stories in a new way: with a podcast.
The actress’s new narrative podcast, Mind Your Own, which launched on Thursday, is all about what it means to be African, told from the perspectives of Kenyans, Ghanaians, Nigerians, South Africans, and more. Each week, Nyong’o, who was born in Mexico and grew up in Kenya, will take listeners on an intimate journey to villages, cities, cemeteries, on planes, and even the red carpet to show the joy, messiness, and complexity of Africa and Africanness.
Though Nyong’o grew up on a steady diet of American shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Step By Step in Kenya, no amount of pop culture could have prepared her for the culture shock she experienced when she arrived in the United States 20 years ago. As she navigated life as a foreigner and learned to speak with an American accent— and what that meant for her career and identity— she took the suggestion of a professor and began listening to NPR’s This American Life.
“What I found there was comfort because every episode, you’re meeting one or two individuals that are really ordinary people going through peculiar, extraordinary circumstances,” she tells ELLE.com. “That show really humanized America for me, one story at a time.”
This American Life also got her thinking about what it would look and sound like to tell the stories of Africans with similar depth and richness. After all, she knew all too well that Africa’s music, literature, fashion, food, and people were far more interesting and complex than the flash reports of famine, war, and corruption the news reported.
As Nyong’o eventually became a household name in Hollywood, earning an Academy Award and an Emmy Award among other accolades, she couldn’t quite let go of the dream of telling the African stories we don’t see and hear enough of. Then, five years ago, amid a podcast boom, she returned to the idea.
Having grown up with her father and other men listening to football matches, the news, music, and other programs on the radio in Kenya, she knew the power of radio on the continent. “This idea remained audio because of how much I know we are an oral people,” she says. “And it’s so much easier to spread the word when it’s just audio than when you involve more bells and whistles to it.”
But now with a decade of experience in Hollywood under her belt, she was also keenly aware of the challenges of trying to sell African ideas globally.“People tend to scratch their heads when you have an idea for a movie or a TV show that is set on the continent because we’re not always considered when it comes to a target market.” So a podcast was a smart solution “to popularize more stories in a more affordable way, a more accessible way, so that we can be expanding our global understanding of what it means to be African today,” she said.
Mind Your Own, produced by KQED’s Snap Studios and distributed by Lemonada Media, dropped its first two episodes on Thursday. One episode tells the gripping story of a grave-robber in Kenya; another of a Ghanaian musician “making it” 25 years after he expected to. In both episodes, Nyong’o guides listeners through her subject’s journeys, but she allows them to lead the way, using her own experiences at the start of the episodes to merely bridge its themes to her life and those of her audience. For example, before launching into the story of Yaw Atta-Owusu (also known by his stage name Ata Kak), Nyong’o describes her struggle to hold onto her Kenyan accent and the moment she decided to use it before starting the press tour for 12 Years a Slave. And in tee-ing up the story of John Kibera, Kenya’s famed grave-robber, Nyong’o recalls a panicked moment in childhood when she chose not to tell the truth.
Each of the remaining eight episodes will be released weekly. At a moment when it feels like just about every celebrity has a podcast, Nyong’o’s stands out for not being self-indulgent. Though her name is in the title of the show and will surely lure in many listeners, her storytelling and sleek sound design (which includes a song by an African artist at the end of each episode) will keep people coming back.
In the first episode, Nyong’o aptly points out that the phrase “mind your own” is often heard across the continent, as “both an admonition and an invitation.” Speaking with ELLE.com, Nyong’o said she wants listeners to feel like they’ve been invited to a dinner party where an engrossing conversation is naturally unfolding.
“I wanted to create that feeling of intimacy that, if you are African, this table is set for you; if you are not, you are invited to join and partake with us,” she says. “The environment is a place of bounty and it’s also a place of gratitude.”
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