IF YOU passed Hawa Golakai on the street, you’d probably pin her as a fashion editor or stylist, the modern African prints hinting at Schiaparelli couture and 1960s op art, topped off by a full Chanel-red pout.
In fact, visual, verbal and plot teases are typical of this Liberian, by way of Togo, Ghana and half a dozen other African countries, who moonlights as a crime writer.
In her day job, Golakai is an immunologist.
Deon Meyer called her first book, The Lazarus Effect, "a wonderful debut … brimming with intelligence, wit and real heart. Enormously entertaining." The sequel is due out at the end of this year.
She won’t reveal the title or much about the plot, except that it’s again set in Cape Town and that it will feature a fresh case, while The Lazarus Effect was punctuated by haunting visions of a missing teenager waiting for her cold case to be resolved. It will feature the series character launched in The Lazarus Effect, the Liberian investigative reporter Voinjama (Vee) Johnson, and Chloe Bishop from Constantia, one-time intern and now sidekick-with-some-secrets.
The Lazarus Effect was long-listed for the Wole Soyinka Prize for African writers and shortlisted for both the Sunday Times Literary Prize for Fiction and the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize for Creative Writing. And Golakai already has her eye on Nollywood star Genevieve Nnaji to bring the right "kickass African beauty" to the part should the dream of a TV or movie adaptation come true.
Born in Germany, Golakai soon arrived in her parents’ home country of Liberia, where they stayed until civil war broke out in 1990. She wove her way south over the years, ending up at university in Cape Town and staying in the city for nearly a decade, ultimately working as an immunology researcher.
But soon after The Lazarus Effect was published, she began to feel the pull of home — Liberia. "The war had ended at last after 14 or 15 years. I’ve always missed home — and it was the place where my friends and I had always imagined becoming parents and having children." She says that one of her favourite pastimes is working on autopsies through her involvement at pathology offices. "One African man told me to my face I was very brave as various superstitions mean most Africans tend to keep away from dead bodies. Most people make it clear I must be crazy seeking out autopsies.
"I’ve had a lot of upheaval in my own life and I know it’s made me superstitious about certain things. But I also know it’s the living people who do all the damage, not the dead."
Apart from her vision of her own future in Liberia, Golakai grew up with several ideas for creative careers. Fashion designer isn’t a surprise, given her own stylish turnout.
"Running a bookshop and a food place together would be like an orgasm for me," she grins. She’s adamant that as well as infusing her work with the credibility of cold, hard facts, her science background has taught her work-life balance, enhancing that life-giving sense of humour which threads its way through her work.
"I need discipline and it’s given me a sense of shape and structure. I will laugh with friends and play on the beach, piss away an entire weekend if I need the break."
At first glance demure and petite, Golakai clearly also sometimes enjoys playing against the type her upbringing framed for her. Her mother is a businesswoman in Botswana and her father a surgeon and dean of a medical school in Liberia. Both have taught their daughter independence and self-responsibility: "If you don’t make it, that’s up to you."
Thanks to her parents and her schoolteacher aunt, Gloria Dunbar, writing was a hobby and reading a passion from an early age. Having started writing children’s books and short stories about five years ago, Golakai found that "Crime is screaming my name.
"It was very daunting, writing in my favourite genre.
"I grew up on Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, Ngaio Marsh, and moved on to Ruth Rendell, Alexander McCall Smith’s Precious Ramotswe and Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallender.
"Agatha Christie is my idol because she created iconic characters in the crime genre at a time when it must have been very shocking.
"Yet the public consumed them in great quantities.
"I know when we travel in our continent it is such a violent place. So I want to reclaim crime writing as an African woman," she says.
"I knew from the beginning Vee Johnson would be a series character and I have plenty of ideas for plots. It would be wonderful to become the Agatha Christie of Africa."
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