Anna Nyakana had an overwhelming need to empower youth and focus on literacy in order to give kids a foundation of knowledge of self versus trauma, which led to her creating the Niyah Zuri series and the two children’s books, Niyah Zuri and the Pharoh’s Throne and Niyah Zuri and the Mayan Eclipse.
Nyakana spoke with rolling out about the Niyah Zuri series and why Black representation is important in children’s books.
What inspired you to create this book series?
The understanding and the purpose of writing the Niyah Zuri series was to ensure that every child had a way to have an identity. I realized that growing up in the US, although I was born and raised in Berlin, Germany, and my family is from Uganda, there was not a real sense of culture here in the US, and that was something that I battled as a youth. Even encountering the things in my environment that were actually failing me, I saw that systematically boiled down to the fact that we didn’t really know ourselves. That was something that never truly left me, the fact that we didn’t have any sort of representation in the books that we were reading.
There’s a lot of indoctrination in the classroom, like “here’s what we want you to know, but we don’t want you to know this stuff that could actually benefit you long term in your life as you’re developing into an adult and figuring out who it is that you are, and what it is that you have a right to believe and go after in this world.” That’s what gave me the inspiration to create the Niyah Zuri series, a series that follows my fearless hero, Niyah Zuri, and the Gonzalez twins, her BFFs. They’re literally going back through time and space to go back to ancient legacies that have built this world. That is something that creates love, empathy, and understanding in every classroom, every household, and every community.
Why is it important for kids to see people who look like them in books?
We don’t have anything telling us majority-wise what it is and what we have the possibility to become. It’s very limited. In children’s books, less than 10 percent of the actual books have any sort of minority characters, it’s more of a certain type of lead, or even an animal … and that’s something that’s not oOK. We need to understand how important and vital it is for every youth, especially the Black boy and girl to have someone to identify with, who can let them know who they are, can let them know that they have a right to keep their imaginations alive, stay creative, that they don’t have to be boxed in, and that regardless of what’s going on in their home or their environment, that they shouldn’t be limited with just a few options.
When those options are not out there, and it’s not represented in any sort of literature, what ends up happening is that you believe what’s told to you. You believe that you are possibly even a second-class citizen because you don’t understand the royalty mentality that you need to have in order to grow and prosper in anything. Everything has been invented, everything has been thought of, everything that has been created on this planet began with us and every Black boy should know that and every young girl should know that. When that’s a possibility, they have so much confidence, that they’re able to move in this world and understand that they don’t have to keep bending and conforming themselves and that this world is bending itself to them.
