A walk through the books, and near-death experience of Award-winning Swiss Broadcaster and Author, Mabelle Prior.
Friday, July 17, 2020
Mabelle Prior is a multiple award-winning Switzerland and Ghanaian Broadcast journalist, and founder of Swiss Most Beautiful pageant.
She's also the author of many books, including Beyond Race, Deadly Friendship, Voyage To The Dark Continent, and The Secret Code.
Her book, Beyond Race, is a social/cultural critic (aka agent provocateur), Mabelle had to put her strong opinions in a handbook that documents some of her thoughts about the idiosyncrasies of Africans. As stated by her: "I had to dissect the lives and lies we live. The vagaries of our unique poverty that stretches into billions of Dollars. Our worn habits dying for an updated version."
In The Secret Code, Mabelle reveals what takes a black woman to start the conversation about the injustice women face, the injustice and disrespect her community faces without raising a fist or burning a city down. Well, Enyonam has the answers. The book centres around Enyonam, a powerful young black Medical Doctor who went through hardships, so she can help her community transgress out of the mental shambles set by the disrespect of her society.
Mabelle talks about the horrors of war in her book: Voyage To The Dark Continent. As stated by her: "War can change people. War takes the good and like in Africa, Etornam and the revolution have changed. People have changed and resorted towards newer behaviours and frame of minds, forgetting history and time."
This story is how Etornam and the revolution fought through segregation, discrimination, colonialism and xenophobia in hopes of changing the African continent, but the people of Africa thought so differently.
When observed from the prism of Mabelle's portrayals of injustice, poverty and war in her books, it'll be less surprising to know that Mabelle herself has been a victim of such—or something similar. In a Facebook post, she reminisced on how she nearly got killed during a music festival in one of the West African countries in the year 2000.
As recalled by her: "That was the day I was nearly killed by an angry crowd of over 10000 people because my image was used to promote the Reggae Festival. I was booked as the hostess. The crowd was expecting Lucky Dube and Rita Marley, and they never turned up. The angry crowd was throwing things at me on stage, broken bottles, anything. They just wanted to kill me. It wasn't even my fault. I was not the organizer!"
It took the intervention of her uncle, who sent soldiers and bodyguards to save her life and whisk her away from the baying mob.
Mabelle harbours no present resentment against them. She's done very well for herself and has developed her career to an enviable pedestal. She finds the incident as an indelible part of history— one which should be told so that man doesn't repeat himself.