MEET THE AUTHOR: Tololwa Mollel, a talented children’s book author

Tololwa Mollel is a children’s author, dramatist and storyteller, who has written sixteen books and several plays as well as stories that he created or adapted for various types  of performance.

His books, which include award winning titles such as ‘Rhinos for Lunch and Elephants for Supper’, ‘Big Boy’, and ‘My Rows and Piles of Coins’, have been published in Canada, the US, Australia, England and Tanzania where he was born.

His books have been translated into various South African languages as well as into  Korean.

In Tanzania, Mollel was a university lecturer and an actor in a touring company that performed around the world, as far as Germany and Sweden.

He continued acting in Canada but later decided  to devote himself to writing and to the literary scene in Edmonton, serving as President of the Writers Guild of Alberta in the late 1990s.

Why do you write for children?

It is challenging to write for children and I like that. It forces one to be inventive, to be able to translate some large idea that may intrigue or interest you as an adult and writer, into a level of writing that would engage a child that would not go over his or her head, breeding boredom. 

I don’t mean to complain or brag but I find out just how hard it is to write for children when I write for adults. Writing for adults is easier, in my opinion, than writing for children. So I like the way writing for children makes me reach deep into my brain to find ways to connect with the young through a versatile use of language.

Also, although we all -- the human race -- like story and storytelling, children are far closer to story and storytelling than adults. Children are closer to the childhood of humanity that invented story and storytelling.

This is not to say adults do not enjoy the magic of story and storytelling; it’s just that perhaps children have more head space for them, and time, and life hasn’t yet begun to get in the way of their enjoyment of those two things which are fundamental to the human race. 

They say that writers can be very antisocial. How do you manage to balance your social life and your writing?

Writing -- like art in general -- is a selfish act. How do I manage the balance? I don’t think I manage it all that well. My writing pulls me away from all that I should gravitate toward, all that matters in a normal state of affairs.  I could easily have become a workaholic like my grandfather, living only to work, if I didn’t have a family.

Thank goodness for family. It provides me with a modicum of humanity. Otherwise all my relationships would be strictly based on the work I do.

 Writing stories about Africa, is that a way to keep your own connection to Africa alive?

No. My connection to Africa is alive, will always be there. The spiritual, the emotional. The geographical or physical connection may not be there anymore, but I always feel I belong, particularly when I meet Africans from so many countries here in the diaspora.

 Ironically, I feel connected to Africa in a broader sense than I felt when I was living in Tanzania. Just because I’m forced by my what they call ‘visible minority’ status here in North America, to reach out to Africa and people of African descent in a gesture of racial solidarity.

Writing stories set in Africa to me comes naturally, like breathing. After all, I came to Canada the first time when I was a young man, after the formative years in Tanzania. I brought so much baggage -- good baggage -- from Tanzania: memories, images, an enduring sense of family relationships with kith and kin very much still rooted in Tanzania.

If anything I find I have to force myself to write stories set beyond Africa in order to avoid a labelling as one living in one place but perpetually tied to a different in his writing.

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