Oakland writer pens tales of black romance
By Hanna Tamrat, STAFF WRITER Inside Bay Area

OAKLAND — In a college cafeteria three decades ago, Chilufia Safaa and Mwangi Kamau struck up a conversation about Africa that led to the beginning of a two-year romantic relationship.

Safaa, an African-American Oakland woman who is now 58, was studying education and speech therapy, and Kamau, a Kenyan man, was studying political science when they met at California State University, East Bay (formerly Hayward).

Little did Safaa know at the time that she would publish her first romance novel in which one main character is born to a Kenyan father.

"A Foreign Affair" was published in June by New York's Dafina/Kensington Publishing, the first of a series of four volumes about the romance between upper-middle-class, educated and sensual men and women within the African diaspora.

Beyond her experience with Kamau, Safaa says she was inspired to write her book in order to satisfy a need that was not met in the numerous books she read since she was 12.

She had a craving for black images in classical romance, later capped by a desire to include in that same genre an underrepresented African nobility, she said.

"I haven't had enough of the connection between continental Africans and African-Americans (in what I read)," Safaa said.

Authors she read would usually make a casual reference to Africa, but few have black characters from the United States and Africa fall in love, she said.

"I decided I would write my own testaments to black love and sensuality," she said.

The first romance book she remembers reading seriously is "Gone With the Wind" at age 12. That was a year after she moved from Alabama (where she was born and lived with her mother and grandparents) to Oakland to live with her father and stepmother. She said the romance book that changed her life was "Rooms of the Heart," by Donna Hill, which she found in a Foothill Square bookstore.

"It opened up a whole new world," Safaa said. "(I discovered) there were phenomenal black women (who wrote) classical romance."

Hooked on reading such authors as Rochelle Alers, Beverly Jenkins and Frances Ray, she often called publishers to find out when their subsequent books were coming out.

Her decision to write one of her own came in 2000, after she attended a Black Romance Writer conference in Texas. There she met with most of the women authors she had read through the years, and they encouraged her, she said.

But what was instrumental to her writing career was meeting future mentor and educator Vivian Stephens, founder of Romance Writers of America.

Stephens, an African-American writing coach/consultant in Texas, was an editor at New York's Dell Publishing Co. when she started the national non-profit association in 1980.

Stephens published one of the first ethnic romances, called "Entwined Destinies," by Rosalind Welles.

"(Safaa's) voice is very fresh," Stephens said. "She brings an excitement to the page in that she deals with other ethnicities in a positive way."

In a lot of other books, romance writers bring the nobility of South America or other regions, Stephens said, but Safaa is the only one to bring characters from Africa and make them heroes.

It took her two years to write her first book. She worked on it whenever she could find the time, including during her second son's basketball practices and her preschool children's playtime in the yard, she said.

Safaa raised two boys and a girl through two marriages but mostly as a single parent. Now she has five grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

With a bachelor's degree in speech and drama and teacher's credentials from Cal State East Bay, Safaa started Wee L'il People in Oakland 17 years ago, after a career of more than two decades as an educator in the Oakland Unified School District.

Located in North Oakland, Wee L'il People serves about 40 children ages 2 to 5 and provides before- and after-school child care for a few Oakland public elementary schools.

"(Safaa) has a wonderful imagination and makes the reader want to know more about the culture in foreign lands," Stephens said.

Although it is fiction, the book makes the reader feel as though Safaa has been to the places she describes in her book, Stephens said.

Most of what she knew about East Africa was the streets in Nairobi, Kenya, gleaned from a book about Kikuyus, a major ethnic group in Kenya, that Kamau gave her to study because he had plans to marry her and move with her to Africa, Safaa said.

But being in her twenties, Safaa said, she was afraid of commitment, and Kamau moved back to Kenya by himself.

In 1995, Safaa traveled to a few West African countries, including Senegal, where she will return to write the third book of her series.

Her second book is scheduled to come out next June from the same publisher.

"The fourth book is still rummaging in my head," Safaa said.

"A Foreign Affair" is available in paperback at book stores for $6.99.

For more information about Safaa and her books, visit her website at http://www.safaagroup.com/.

Staff Writer Hanna Tamrat can be reached at htamrat@angnewspapers.com.