Three young culture influencers from Africa who are shaking up the old continent with their own unique and inventive mix of narrative, hard-nosed realism and pure grit. They inspire me.

1.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born September 15, 1977) is an acclaimed Nigerian writer whose first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was published in 2003 and won the Best First Book award in the 2005 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, named after the flag of the short-lived Biafran nation, is set before and during the Biafran War. It was published by Knopf/Anchor in 2006 and was awarded the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction.

Her third book is a collection of short stories titled The Thing Around Your Neck and was published in April 2009 by Fourth Estate in the UK and Knopf in the US.

2.

Dambisa Moyo is an economist and the author of Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way For Africa, published in the spring of 2009. The book offers proposals for developing countries to finance development, instead of relying on foreign aid. It became a New York Times bestseller upon its release in the United State and remains a bestseller amongst Political and Economic books. In May 2009, TIME Magazine named Moyo one of the world’s 100 most influential people. Click here to find out more in an interview she gave the New York Times.

3. 

William Kamkwamba, a young Malawian in re-inventing how Africans access natural resources. In the middle of one of Malawi’s worst droughts, seven yers ago, the then-14-year-old taught himself to build windmills. He scoured through junkyards for items, including bicycle parts, plastic pipes, tractor fans and car batteries. For the tower, he collected wood from blue-gum trees.”Everyone laughed at me when I told them I was building a windmill. They thought I was crazy,” he said. “Then I started telling them I was just playing with the parts. That sounded more normal.” That was 2002. Now, he has five windmills, the tallest at 37 feet. He built one at an area school that he used to teach classes on windmill-building. The full story – http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/10/05/malawi.wind.boy/index.html