About

Farida
Dzifa Alabo

Farida Dzifa Alabo is a writer of literary historical fiction, born in the former Soviet Union to a Ghanaian father and a Moroccan mother, both pursuing their doctorates at the University of Kyiv, and raised across Africa, Europe, and North America. She is now based in Accra and London. Her work examines how power moves through borders, institutions, and paperwork, and what erasure can do to a people.

Her father is Ewe. The Ewe people straddle what is now Ghana and Togo, a division imposed by colonial cartography that split the Gold Coast from French Togoland in the late nineteenth century. Unlike the Ashanti, who negotiated directly with the British Crown, the Ewe had no centralised kingdom and left few records that colonial administrators chose to keep. Their history is largely one of erasure. The Gold Paradox begins there.

Her fiction is shaped by writers who understood that the past is not distant: Marguerite Yourcenar, Anton Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, Kurt Vonnegut. Like them, she is drawn to the observer who stands slightly outside events, sardonic and precise, watching how power is administered, how records are kept, and what disappears when they are not.

A multilingual communications and strategy leader with over twenty years of experience across Africa and the Middle East. She thinks of the two lives, the writer and the strategist, as the same occupation conducted by different means.