Saturday, December 30, 2017
How orphans triggered my latest novel – Hadiza El-Rufai
Hadiza Isma El-Rufai, the First Lady of Kaduna State, is author of ‘An Abundance of Scorpions’, a novel inspired by her work with orphans. She is founder of Yasmin El-Rufai Foundation, a non-profit literary organization. Bookshelf cornered her for a chat.
How did the idea for your novel, ‘An Abundance of Scorpions’ come to you?
I first got the idea for the book from a volunteer work I did with an orphanage in Abuja. That was what started the whole thing. I wanted to write a story about an orphan, so the novel is like the back story of the tale about that orphan. The second novel I am working on now is the one I actually started writing before ‘An Abundance of Scorpions’, which I eventually decided to develop into a novel.
Today in History- 30th December
In post-revolutionary Russia, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) is established, comprising a confederation of Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine, and the Transcaucasian Federation (divided in 1936 into the Georgian, Azerbaijan, and Armenian republics). Also known as the Soviet Union, the new communist state was the successor to the Russian Empire and the first country in the world to be based on Marxist socialism.
During the Russian Revolution of 1917 and subsequent three-year Russian Civil War, the Bolshevik Party under Vladimir Lenin dominated the soviet forces, a coalition of workers’ and soldiers’ committees that called for the establishment of a socialist state in the former Russian Empire. In the USSR, all levels of government were controlled by the Communist Party, and the party’s politburo, with its increasingly powerful general secretary, effectively ruled the country. Soviet industry was owned and managed by the state, and agricultural land was divided into state-run collective farms.