Kola Boof (1972- ) is a Sudanese-American writer who is best known as the one-time mistress of Osama bin Laden.
She says that one night in Morocco in 1996 she went out to eat with her date. Later Bin Laden and his men arrived and he saw her. His men told her date to leave and brought her to Bin Laden’s table. They talked. Later that night he and his men came to her hotel room. He raped her. A Moroccan prince later backed up her story.
In fear for her life she became Bin Laden’s lover. He flew her to Medina and put her up in La Maison Arabe for six months. She last saw him in 1998.
Peter Bergen of CNN says she is making it all up: Bin Laden was never in Morocco in 1996.
She has also helped to get guns for the SPLA, which was fighting for the independence of southern Sudan. The Arab-speaking Muslims in the north have killed millions of blacks in the south and sold others as slaves. (Alek Wek fled the violence there.)
Boof is from Sudan but not from the south. She was born at Omdurman, across the Nile from Khartoum, the capital. Her parents were both foreigners: her father was an Arab from Egypt, an archaeologist. Her mother was blue black, as she puts it, an Oromo from Somalia.
Her parents stood up against how blacks were kept down and made into slaves. They were killed for it. Boof went to Egypt to live with her grandmother. That did not last: her grandmother thought Boof was too dark to fit in and sent her to live with an Ethiopian couple in England. Her new parents in turn thought she was a witch and so she wound up in America in Washington, DC, brought up by a Black American couple:
I knew that I was special and that I had been placed with very special people in a very special paradise. I felt that something magical was going to happen. You must understand that the Black Americans are very magical people – because their hearts are broken.
She had to deal with American black self-hatred, something she writes about in her book “Diary of a Lost Girl” (2007).
She learned English in part by watching “Days of Our Lives” and other soap operas on television. She would later write for “Days of Our Lives”! To this day she loves soaps but thinks they have fallen behind the times.
When she read Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” it changed her life:
It planted art inside me and it possessed me, because at 14, it was the first time that I had heard somebody tell the truth in America.
She sees writing as a “constant struggle for ‘sincerity'”, as a way to express the painful truths that have been killing her inside all her life.
As a writer she is not well known but she has her fans, like Derrick Bell and Chinweizu, who speak highly of her writing.
See also:
Abagond 