About author . . .
Alba Kunadu Sumprim has been writing for as long as she can remember and regularly flips through, with a wry smile, the stacks of notebooks that contain what can only be described as the melodrama of her teenage years.
She graduated from Escuela International de Cine y Television (EICTV), the Cuban film school, as an Editor and worked on several short and independent film projects in Cuba and London before moving back to Ghana, where she now earns her living writing screenplays, television programmes, producing and directing television commercials.
She has been on the writing and editing team of the BBC WORLD SERVICES TRUST Radio drama, ‘Story Story, Voices from the Market,’ for over six years. She was a writer and director for the BBC WST television drama, entitled, 'Wetin Dey!'
Her successful weekly social commentary column – The Imported Ghanaian – has been running for ten years in The Daily Dispatch newspaper, Accra.
She lives in Accra, where she is regularly accused of being Senegalese, Malian, Ivorian, Liberian, Kenya or Zimbabwean, in fact, any other nationality but Ghanaian. She is adamant that she is just as Ghanaian as any other ... though imported.
About Book . . .
With her rose tinted glasses firmly in place, the Imported Ghanaian deluded herself, believing that she could simply waltz into Kotoka International Airport with a grin like the winning ticket in the national lottery, and the band would strike up whilst the jubilant nation screamed, "Akwaaba-o, akwaaba, our sister has returned back to us."
She returned home thinking she was as Ghanaian as any other and that she would fit in snugly with the skills of a chameleon. The reality proved otherwise as she plunged headfirst into the endurance test of living in Ghana, where nothing is ever what it seems.
Layer by layer, as if peeling an onion. each 'coming back home' cultural reality weaves her through a world where 'you can never be too sure,' where 'an invitation is not exactly an invitation,' where 'you have to die to find out how popular your are,' and where 'being a Ghanaian and being Ghanaian are often two opposing concepts.
