Ugandan Climate Activist Vanessa Nakate Will Release Her First Book This Fall
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This September, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish 24-year-old Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate’s book A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis. The book, which OprahMag.com is exclusively announcing today, is about Nakate’s road to empowerment, and how others can follow her lead.
“I couldn’t be more excited or proud to help bring Vanessa Nakate’s incredible, world-changing activism to readers,” acquiring editor Rakia Clark tells OprahMag.com. “Vanessa’s emerged as one of the most important and critical voices on climate justice and race. I can’t wait for American audiences to get more familiar with her work—and to be inspired to take action.”
Nakate first drew worldwide attention when she stood alongside Greta Thunberg and four other young white European climate activists at Davos in 2020, but in the photo of the group the Associated Press syndicated, Nakate's image was inexplicably cut out. As Nakate said at the time: “The cropping made it possible to believe that African climate activists were absent from Davos; that Africans weren’t active in the climate change movement; and that there wasn’t a global youth climate movement that included people like me and many others in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.”
For Nakate, the omission highlighted the intersection between climate change and racial and social injustice, and that often those least responsible for climate change—such as Africans and inhabitants of the Global South—are the people most impacted by it. Nakate is determined to ensure that those voices are finally heard.
In an interview with OprahMag.com, Nakate spoke from Kampala about being a shy loner who was inspired to take action on behalf of her country and her continent by the example of her parents, who work within their communities to combat hunger, health care issues, and deforestation, and by young climate activists such as Thunberg and others.
“Right now,” Nakate says, “people don’t understand the urgency of the climate crisis. In my part of the world and others, people are being left with nothing—no food, no water, no place to live—as a direct result of climate change. And we will never get to zero hunger or achieve gender equality or lift millions from poverty without addressing climate change.” She vows to use her voice—"to use every resource I have to address the world’s greatest threat.”
The book, which Nakate describes as “a memoir and a manifesto,” will chronicle her journey to activism, document the most urgent issues facing her community, and offer ideas on sustainable solutions and other ways readers can engage around the problem.
Like millions of others around the globe, Nakate watched Youth Inaugural Poet Amanda Gorman recite her poem at the presidential inauguration on January 20, and was inspired. When asked about young women like herself, and like Gorman, who are raising their voices to make change in the world, Nakate said: “Young women are the light this world needs right now. Young women are the solution the world needs right now. Yet few have been given the platform to speak their truth. There is power in our voices. There is power in our activism. There are so many young women who haven’t yet gotten the platforms to tell their stories. We need to give them those platforms.”
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