“Sensationalism only works for so long. Think of something like the Kony 2012 campaign. Its sensationalized, viral language got people all hot and bothered, but at the end of the day, there was so much it got wrong about the situation, and that did more damage to their cause than what they got right.”

Nigerian-American author and medical doctor

Uzodinma Iweala is a Nigerian-American author and medical doctor. He is known for his fiction and nonfiction on Nigerian life, identity, and crisis, including his debut novel, Beasts of No Nation, and later works such as Our Kind of People and Speak No Evil. Beasts of No Nation grew out of his thesis work at Harvard and follows a child soldier in an unnamed African country. Published in 2005 and later adapted into an award-winning film in 2015, it drew attention from major outlets including Time, The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Times, and Rolling Stone. In 2012, he published Our Kind of People, a nonfiction book about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Nigeria, and in 2018 he released Speak No Evil, which centers on the life of a gay Nigerian-American boy named Niru.