Adelaide Casely-Hayford, born on the 2nd of June in 1868, was a Sierra Leone Creole Pan-African feminist, educator, and author. Hayford established a vocational school for young girls in Sierra Leone that emphasized racial and cultural pride.
Hayford was born into an elite Sierra Leone family in Freetown, British Sierra Leone. She spent much of her youth in England and studying throughout the West, also studying music in Germany at the age of 17.
While in England, Adelaide married West African author and Pan-Africanist J. E. Casely Hayford (also known as Ekra-Agiman). Their marriage may have influenced her transformation into a cultural nationalist.
In May 1914, Hayford returned to Sierra Leone, dedicating the rest of her life to educating African girls. In October 1923, she established the Girls' Vocational School, one of the first educational institutions in Sierra Leone to provide young girls with an African-centered education, according to historian Keisha N. Blain.
Hayford frequently traveled throughout the world, giving a speaking tour in the United States on misconceptions about Africa. Author Brittany Rogers notes that these travels also exposed her to the exploitation of black female labor throughout the world.
Although her educational concept for young girls had a Victorian-influenced, middle class domesticity in mind, Rogers writes that these travels led Hayford to begin writing and speaking on matters of labor as well. Hayford died in her hometown of Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1960.
"Instantly my eyes were opened to the fact that the education meted out to [African people] had...taught us to despise ourselves. Our immediate need was an education which would instill into us a love of country, a pride of race, an enthusiasm for the black man's capabilities, and a genuine admiration for Africa's wonderful art work."
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RoyalRoad slop review (emphatically not a recommendation today) The Best Defense is a 20 minutes into the future First Contact story set in 2028 wherein an alien galactic empire structured as five of the most dysfunctional trade unions possible discovers humanity having progressed alarmingly fast since their last survey of earth some hundreds of years ago. They abduct a dozen people and start running home to report back but their craft is spotted on the way out and humanity gets started on preparing to defend itself from them on their return.
It's very reminiscent of Ben Bova (derogatory). The author likes the US Navy, private space companies, and describing women's appearances in not quite lurid detail. There has been precisely one line of dialogue from China so far in this near future space story, and the author's notes frequently talk about being apolitical, the worst kind of political.
The President, of unspecified party, is running for re-election in 2028 and his Secretary of Commerce is emphatic that all space discoveries must be freely shared with the world and the outer space treaty must be respected, which the POV characters she says this to, a room full of Space Force "Guardians," all roll their eyes at.
One of the abductees, a white woman, uses the word "latinx" to describe one of her fellow abductees, a Mexican man, and he is enraged almost to the point of attacking her. Then he and a former US Marine lecture her about how her woke college language doesn't belong in the Real World.
The main private spaceflight company featured is primarily funded by a man described as being a self made billionaire twice over because he made a fortune in the USSR, then fled to the US in 1989 and made another fortune from nothing because of his smart investing.
Edit: there are, as yet, precisely zero gay or trans people in the story, and also zero Muslims. The author wrote an author's notes justifying the latter on the basis that the aliens only abducted people from highly developed areas and that he had originally intended to make one of the abductees who is a Hindu man Muslim but made him Hindu instead because that was the only way he could think of to make a character vegetarian without it being "social commentary."
Rank cowardice. Send him to the sci fi
where he will be re-educated to understand that 1.) Sci fi is an inherently political genre and 2.) He is a big poopyhead loser nerd.
Everything is political, and both sci fi and being apolitical are especially political. There's a subset of sf authors who insist that they "hate politics" while writing extremely openly political stories, stories of war and ideology and society. This subset overlaps strongly with mil-sf.
The last vaguely military scifi story i could stomach were the Ancillary books, and those were most about being gay with your depressed spaceship and also realizing that imperialism is bad.
I couldn't get into the Ancillary series, it was too grimdark for me.
Read Unjust Depths, the best gay trans communist military sf web novel on the internet