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By Elizabeth RubinPhotography by Mario Testino
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In her new movie, Queen of Katwe_, Lupita Nyong’o brings her talent and brilliance to a story from her native East Africa. To celebrate, she takes_ Vogue_—and the most glorious prints of the season—to her family’s village in Kenya._
Lupita Nyong’o walks tall, much taller than her height. Her mother, Dorothy, once said that her family will forever tease her about how she walks: as if she believes she’s six feet tall. (She’s five-five.) The first time I meet her, at a laid-back taverna in Brooklyn, where she lives, I feel that walk. She is cool, straight-backed, circumspect. She doesn’t ooze emotion the way many young Americans do. She orders the green eggs and lamb, and lets the joke speak for itself, not offering a gratuitous laugh. But once we start speaking about her work, she’s all in, as if able to forget the public Lupita for a moment or two, slip inside the details of story and character, and let go.
Around Christmas of 2014, Lupita got an email from the director Mira Nair with the script for Queen of Katwe, which tells how Phiona Mutesi, an uneducated girl from the slums of Uganda, rises to become the chess champion of her country and an international chess master. Nair wanted her to play Phiona’s mother, Harriet. “Five pages in I wrote my manager and agent with the words ‘I must do this film,’ ” says Lupita.
Lupita Nyong’o visits her family home and farm in Kenya:
“To play a mother of four in Uganda, a formidable mother who has so much working against her, was so compelling to me. It wasn’t something I thought I’d be asked to do”—at least not by Hollywood. “The fact that it was based on a true story, an uplifting story out of Africa. . . .” She inhales and shakes her head. “Oh, my goodness, all my dreams were coming true in that script.”
I’d just seen her on Broadway in Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed. She played a fifteen-year-old Liberian called the Girl, sheltering with wives numbers one and three of a Liberian commander who is never seen onstage. The Girl is forced to become the fourth wife until Maima (wife number two), a warrior with an AK-47, shows up and persuades her to escape captivity and join the fight. Lupita gave an incredibly physical performance. She leaped, wailed, hid, manipulated her face in the exaggerated way children do. She inhabited the child’s naïveté and ruthlessness, and crumbled, too, like a child.
“Lupita employs a powerful intellect in her work and makes very deep, very intricate choices. And she’s just relentless in her pursuit of authenticity and specificity of the character,” says Gurira, who is an actress (The Walking Dead) as well as a playwright. “She is 150 percent every second, doing more and more work offstage, growing in her understanding of that world. It’s a dream for a writer.” It’s what Lupita said she needed “after that long roller-coaster ride that culminated in the Academy Awards.”
For Nyong’o, 2014 was a year that only happens in fairy tales or Hollywood, a year that spun the then-31-year-old actress of 12 Years a Slave into an icon of fashion, beauty, and cool, a star whose combination of grace and mischief and timing on the scene broke a color barrier that never should have existed. In the six months leading up to the Oscars, she swirled through 66 red carpets. She was dubbed People’s Most Beautiful Person and appeared on the cover of multiple magazines. “But it was all not acting,” she says.
The director of 12 Years a Slave, artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen, who continues to be a guiding voice for her, told her, “You have to go right back to the beginning, to when you saw your first film or dressed up, and remind yourself what the purpose is, why you got into the profession, because you get seduced by the obvious.” And so Lupita harnessed her newly minted Oscar power to bring Eclipsed to the stage. And with Queen of Katwe and the forthcoming film adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah—and even to some extent with her fantasy roles as the pirate Maz Kanata in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Nakia in Marvel’s Black Panther, mother wolf Raksha in Disney’s new Jungle Book—Lupita is using her stature to reshape the way the world sees itself, to reflect images that have always been present but weren’t being looked at.
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Lupita Nyong’o on Star Wars, Shakespeare, and secret talents:
She didn’t set out with a mission to tell these African stories, Lupita says. It happened organically. “Being able to use my platform to expand and diversify the African voice,” she says, searching for the right words, “I feel very passionate about that. It feels intentional, meaningful.”
There’s something about Lupita that also feels intentional, as if she had been groomed, designed even, to be a messenger, to bear with poise the privilege and burden of her newfound fame. Mira Nair has known her for many years almost as a daughter. (Nair’s husband, Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, is an old friend of Lupita’s father from their days in the late sixties as student activists at Makerere University.) Lupita interned for Nair on The Namesake. Then, when Nair was setting up Maisha, a lab for East African filmmakers in Kampala, Lupita joined her as a production coordinator—of course, all the young directors there wanted her in their films even then.
“Her roots are strong, which is why she flies,” says Nair over dinner in New York, where she is rehearsing for the Broadway debut of the musical based on her film Monsoon Wedding. “She knows where she comes from and uses that to see the world. She has seen ups and downs through the family’s journey; that gives her a clear-eyed approach to who she plays and what she stands for.”
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And whether it’s cutting-edge music, dance, or fashion, “it sounds boring to say this, but the politics of representation—what we represent when we do our thing—she knows how to use the system and be true to herself.” Nair laughs. “Really, I know her as someone who is greedy for fun,” she says, thumbing through her iPhone to find the photo she sent Lupita of an amazing hairstyle she saw in a book—cornrows rising up into a bulbous Popsicle. “Next thing I knew, at the Met Gala she did the hair.” The hair: high, tall, a sculptural exclamation.
Eclipsed closed in June, and Lupita went to Bali to relax. You can see her there on Facebook and Instagram, two formats she curates with a careful selection of Lupitas—diva, fashionista, monitor of Lupita cartoons and drawings on #FanArtFriday, and messenger sharing videos like Mic’s “23 Ways You Could Be Killed If You Are Black in America.”
The following month, I catch up with her in Kenya, where she has traveled to her family’s ancestral village in the Luo homeland, a stone’s throw from Lake Victoria. “We’d visit my grandparents, spend my vacations here; all the cousins would come from around the world to spend Christmas in the village,” says Lupita. Today she’s wearing a baby-blue halter dress and an udeng, an Indonesian headdress. “I saw them on the men and thought, That will work so well for me. It’s a little cultural appropriation,” she says, quite pleased. We’re at the Acacia Premier Hotel in the nearest town, Kisumu, where she’s staying.
In the afternoon, we caravan out to the family grounds, past the railroad and the strange Stonehenge-size rocks balancing on the horizon. The most famous is Kit Mikayi—which means “stones of the first wife” in Luo, the language and name of the Nyong’o family’s ethnic group, which stretches across parts of Kenya, South Sudan, Uganda, and Tanzania. The place is still a sacred pilgrimage site.
Up a dirt road, past a malaria-research hospital funded by Walter Reed, Ratta Mixed Secondary school, fields, chickens, goats, and short-horned cows, we arrive at the gated family compound. A sign nearby reads: An experiment in rural living. Lupita’s father, Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, has taken to grand-scale farming—bananas, tomatoes, potted kale, fruit trees, maize.
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Lupita is the second of six children from a prominent Kenyan family. Her mother manages the Africa Cancer Foundation. Her father is a senator, political activist, and former university lecturer. She and her siblings grew up in the public eye, negotiating visibility, privilege, and politics.
A wellspring in the village is named after her great-great-grandfather. On her grandparents’ land stands a small, stately chapel built in memory of her grandfather, the region’s first clergyman, who ministered to the poor and brought Christianity and education to the villagers. After his death, Lupita’s grandmother completed their project to build a dormitory for orphaned or disadvantaged girls from the district so that they could go to school unencumbered by suitors or domestic chores.
In a glass-enclosed patio at Lupita’s parents’ house, her father—a dramatic storyteller—narrates in great detail his political past: leading demonstrations, getting detained and interrogated, security men ransacking the house during the regime of Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi. His brother Charles vanished at just 26. The family heard he was thrown off a ferry. “It was vicarious punishment,” says Nyong’o, busy fielding calls and messages on his iPhone. “Fascist regimes, if they can’t get you, they get your wife or uncle.”
In 1981, he and Dorothy went into self-imposed exile with their first daughter, Zawadi, now a digital activist for social justice. He took a teaching position in Mexico, where Lupita was born and given her non-African name. They also gave her a Luo name—Amondi, which means “born at dawn.” When the family returned to Nairobi, the trouble also returned. Peter was thrown in the infamous Nyayo House torture chamber—you’re kept dirty, cold, unfed, and interrogated day after day. “It’s dehumanization. It demoralizes you.”
Did the kids know about all this? I ask.
Oh, yes, he nods. “We told them everything. “Zawadi was traumatized. These things made her afraid of the outside world.”
Lupita too?
“I don’t think so. The trouble with Lupita is she grew under the shadow of Zawadi,” he says. “Terrorized by her . . . ah, siblings”—he shakes his head—“until they separated in early high school and Lupita found her own personality.”
Lupita was already acting and leading the other kids in kindergarten. By high school at St. Mary’s, in Nairobi, she was in all the musicals. “When I got there, I kept hearing ‘Lupita this, Lupita that,’ and I thought, Is she some supermodel?” a Kenyan producer tells me. “All the guys talked about her. She had a walk.”
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Just a day in the Nyong’o world and I can imagine the origins of both Lupita’s confidence and her freedom. Outside on the terrace Dorothy teaches Lupita how to make ugali for a video—Lupita had confessed on Kenyan TV that she cannot cook the national dish made of cornmeal. Dorothy moves about the grounds with elegance, a regal bearing, overseeing the cooking, the cleaning—doing much herself. She has been the tree shading the children from their father’s tumultuous political career—seeking ways to cultivate their interests.
When Lupita was fourteen, her aunt encouraged her to audition for the Phoenix Players, the only repertory-theater group in Nairobi. It was Dorothy who drove her to rehearsals, sat in the car doing her work so Lupita could perform Juliet and cement her name in Nairobi thespian circles.
“My mother had dream charts and would say, ‘What do you want to dream short-term, long-term, mid-term?’ ” Lupita recalls. “She really believed in dreaming out loud.”
She can’t help comparing her story with that of the characters in Queen of Katwe. “Phiona keeps going up against her mother and is unable to achieve her potential until her mother comes on board in a little way, even just buying the kerosene that allows Phiona to read.” (Phiona, like so many village girls, walks kilometers to fetch water, helps her mother with washing and cooking, and by the time she has a minute to study the chess books that could elevate her game, it’s dark and there’s no electricity.) Eventually Harriet will sell her clothing fabric to get kerosene for Phiona. “You see how you can hinder your children, not because you mean to,” and here Lupita walls her hands around her eyes, “but because you have a limited view.”
Instead, Lupita’s family fostered a leader with an appetite for the dramatic, loud gesture. At nineteen she shaved her head, an act very few girls would have dared at that time.
“I wanted to know what my head looked like,” she exclaims. She was also tired of going to the salon. Relaxed hair has to be styled weekly. The process can burn your scalp, cause scabs and itching. It’s an ordeal. “My father doesn’t know this, but it was at his prompting. He was funding my hairdos, and at one point he said, ‘Ah, why don’t you just cut it all off?’ ” She took him up on it. For two weeks he was too busy to notice. One day at the table he did a double take. “Where’s your hair?”
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“You said I should cut it!” she says, laughing, slapping her thigh, and closing her eyes.
Perhaps it’s the times—a black U.S. president, Black Lives Matter, and the matter of hair—but for sure Lupita’s hair has rippled across continents. Shaved is beautiful. You walk into the salon here and ask for the Lupita style—close-cropped head, big earrings, the antithesis of the braid extensions called the Obama line, or the braids curved around your head and called the Bensouda style (after Fatou Bensouda, the Gambian prosecutor of the International Criminal Court). A beautician at a local salon tells me that four years ago, girls outside the village did not shave their heads. Bad form. “Lupita changed that,” she says.
Ground breaking is a rough process. It bruises even the toughest. In April 2014, a Hollywood magazine ran a shocking analysis of “post-Oscar Lupita,” suggesting that her future prospects were complicated and her dark skin challenged an industry predisposed to light. “Would Beyoncé be who she is if she didn’t look like she does?” asked a talent agent named Tracy Christian. “Being lighter-skinned, more people can look at her image and see themselves in her. In Lupita’s case I think she has two-and-half, three years. If she can find a franchise, a big crossover film, or if she’s cast by a significant filmmaker, then she’s golden, she’ll have carved out a unique path for herself.”
Really, I know her as someone who is greedy for fun
Mira Nair
We’re at the Acacia, which overlooks Lake Victoria. Lupita notices the hyacinth are back, greening large swaths of the lake. Though the plants are beautiful, the fishermen say they are a sign of the water’s pollution and are causing a scarcity of fish. She sighs. “I have to deafen my ears to that Christian lady,” she says, referring to the talent agent. “She is looking at me as part of the cultural tapestry.” She throws out her arms. “I am living and breathing. That person is not considering what I had for breakfast, how that is sitting in my stomach, and why I didn’t do well with that audition.” She shakes her head. “I can’t think like that.”
There’s a silence. “I cannot run away from who I am and my complexion or the larger society and how they may view that. I realize that with what I shared at the Essence awards.”
It is one of the great speeches on beauty, a landmark that outlasted the night two years ago when Lupita recounted being taunted about her dark skin, and how she bargained with God that she’d stop stealing sugar cubes if she could wake up with lighter skin.
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“The European sense of beauty affects us all,” she says abruptly. “I came home from college in the early two-thousands and saw ads on TV with a girl who can’t get a job. She uses this product. She gets her skin lighter. She gets the job. The lording of lighter skin is a common thing growing up in Nairobi. Being called ‘black mamba.’ The slow burn of recognizing something else is better than you.”
Until it’s not. Along comes Alek Wek, the model from South Sudan, “dark as night” on all the runways, celebrated in magazines and TV. Lupita could not believe the world was embracing as beautiful a woman “who looked so much like me.”
And now it is Lupita blasting doors open, as she has apparently done for a young Ugandan-British woman who worked in production on Queen of Katwe, who told her: “I’ve never had so many people call me beautiful until you showed up. I get called to auditions I never would have been called to before. And I know it’s because you exist.” She wasn’t emoting, just stating facts. “Alek Wek changed how dark people saw themselves. That I could do the same in a way for somebody somewhere is amazing,” Lupita says, bounding out of her chair, talking about the benefit of having visibility and influence. She is the first black woman, for example, to have landed a Lancôme contract. “There is no point in getting your picture taken if it doesn’t move somebody.” Her eyes widen. “Right?”
Lupita has firsthand experience with the power of images, words, their performance and endurance. “I watched my father speak a lot,” she says, recalling her days on the campaign trail with him and her siblings, singing party songs, making up dances, speaking to the constituents. “He is quite the speaker. He has his own flair. It’s a performance art, politics.”
Ever on the ball, aware that the reverse is true, she’s lent her voice to save elephants and to end maternal mortality in childbirth. She’s supported a project for girls begun by Salima Visram, who grew up in Mombasa near an impoverished village with no electricity. Visram designed a backpack for children fitted with a solar panel that is connected to a battery pack. As the children take the long walk to school, their battery is charged, and at night, after chores, the battery can power an LED lamp and they can study. Lupita loved the idea and devised a quote for the backpack: The power is in your step—Lupita Nyong’o. Today Visram has produced 500 backpacks, with 3,000 more in the works, and has moved the factory to Kenya to generate employment and income.
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“There are certain cards that have been dealt me that I take on,” Lupita says. “I want to create opportunities for other people of color because I’m fortunate enough to have a platform to do that. That is why Eclipsed and even Queen of Katwe are so important, to change the narrative, offer a new lens on African identity.”
It’s also why she wanted to make Adichie’s Americanah—“a portrait of African dynamism and racial commentary,” she says, but at its heart, an epic love story of two Nigerians across three continents: That will be a first for Hollywood. Lupita preordered the book, devoured it, and asked a mutual friend, Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina, to forward an email to Adichie. Though 12 Years a Slave had not yet premiered, she wanted to buy the rights and make the movie. “I can’t tell you how much I laughed and cried out loud reading your book,” she wrote Adichie. “As an African actress looking to develop great projects, I am always searching for characters who are full of life, complicated and indelible in their pursuits and in their needs.”
Americanah is filled with such characters. Lupita wanted to play Ifemelu, the young Nigerian student who comes to America (babysitting for her auntie and then making her way to college) and experiences its baffling, offensive, fertile, and privileged ways. She soon begins an anonymous blog with such titles as “To My Fellow Non-American Blacks: In America, You Are Black, Baby,” and observations like “If you are a woman, please do not speak your mind as you are used to doing in your country. Because in America, strong-minded black women are scary.” Her blog takes off; advertisers want in, and she’s suddenly the It girl on race, invited to conferences and workshops, all of which intensifies her unease—it’s clear that Lupita might identify with Ifemelu’s experiences.
Adichie was curious when she got Nyong’o’s email. She asked Wainaina what Lupita was like, if she was “real,” because “being real” matters, and when “Binya said, ‘Yes, very real,’ ” she decided to go ahead. “I liked the idea of a young African woman being at the center of the adaptation,” says Adichie.
On a slight rise past the Prayer Palace Christian Centre and the Shepherd’s Grammar School in a corner of Kampala’s Katwe slum stands a one-story building, painted brown, with a corrugated-metal roof. It’s a clean, well-tended shelter, like a church. And it’s blessed by elevation—in Katwe, that is how your wealth is measured. Like any Ugandan slum, Katwe is an unforgiving place where raw sewage festers in gutters along the mud road, and the earth is so unstable that when the rains come, you, your children, and your belongings are likely to be swept away if you’re low to the ground. With no state of welfare to fall back on, your wits are your survival.
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In this chess club, Robert Katende (played by David Oyelowo in the film) continues to deploy chess to teach life to children, to plan, strategize, and hope. There are two benches against the yellow wall, but the kids sit on the floor—that way no space is wasted on chairs. Curious teachings written by the kids adorn the walls.
Never reply when you are angry.
Never make a promise when you are happy.
Never waste your time on revenge.
In Nair’s movie, Phiona shadows her brother Brian through the alleys of Katwe and spies him through a crack in the club’s wooden slats. Coach Robert sees her, invites her in, and one of the young girls entices her into the world of chess by holding up a pawn and a queen. “In chess, the small one can become the big one,” she says. Robert doesn’t pay much mind. Girls were not taken as seriously as boys, but over time he notices that she is learning fast and winning.
The real Harriet has come by today in a bright-blue dress with yellow embroidery. We talk about the days when she didn’t trust Robert and took Phiona out of the club. She had lost hope, says Robert, interrupting. “She tried to get the kids in school. She failed. She sold her mattress. The money wasn’t enough. They were chased out of school for defaulting tuition.” And so like many in Katwe she reduced her dreams to survival, with the kids selling eggplants and maize. “And now Robert comes,” he says, pointing at himself and laughing, “and says, ‘Let me take them to the chess club.’ ” Harriet is smiling, and I ask her what persuaded her to let Robert take the children back to compete. She closes her eyes. Her arms are crossed on her chest. “His faith,” she says. And his aid. He paid the rent when they were thrown onto the street. He paid their hospital bill when one of her four children was ill. He was always there. “I started to trust him,” she says, smiling. Shy. Sly. Contained. As Lupita puts it: “Harriet shines. She is very reserved but also very cheeky.”
And that is what inspired Nair to make this film, when Tendo Nagenda, a Ugandan vice president for Disney, told her the story. She saw Harriet as a Mother Courage who would do anything to save her children except compromise her values. And she saw in Katwe a story she had to tell. “We need to know that genius is everywhere, that you don’t have to leave everyone behind while ascending.”
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Phiona today—now in her 20s—is thriving in school and chess, and has opened more than 300 chess clubs. That such a story can be told to the world thrills Lupita as much as it did Nair. Lupita has always been attracted and moved by risk-takers and dreamers and wants their experiences known.
“I have an inner compass,” she says, pointing. She follows the direction the arrow is facing whenever a potential project comes along. Does it sing? Is it pointing north or south? And because the destiny of an actor depends on others, she says, “I am definitely at a point where I feel like taking charge of what I want to make.”
While she wants to work with risk-taking directors like Kathryn Bigelow and Ava DuVernay, director of Selma, she’d also love to meet and talk to those courageous, perhaps less well known women who forged their own radical paths, like Assata Shakur. She was a member of the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army, was convicted of several crimes, escaped from prison, and got political asylum in Cuba, where she lives, still wanted by the FBI. Her choices, her destiny, would definitely make a fascinating tale. “Maybe for a future project,” Lupita says with a mischievous smile. “You never know.”
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