The following article first appeared on Girls Guide to Swagger and is posted here with permission by author Cynthia Brown.
What can you say about a woman who left a successful catering business in New York City to volunteer for the Peace Corps in the hopes of empowering African women and children and in the process cut off the head of a poisonous snake – in her kitchen, with a machete! Well, you could say that Bonnie Lee Black has swagger. And you’d be right!
Bonnie had her own catering business in New York, serving the rich and famous. After ten years in the business, she was tired of New York and tired of waiting on rich people. A breast cancer scare prompted her to look at her life and ponder how she would like to live. Bonnie wanted to do something new with her life, something gratifying and purposeful.
So she decided to join the Peace Corps and was sent to Gabon, in Central Africa to work with women and children on improving their nutrition and health. Ten hours away from the Peace Corps office, in Gabon’s capital Libreville, Bonnie worked independently, using all her creativity to engage the women and children in the small town where she was posted. She made puppets to entertain and teach the kids and taught nutritious cooking to the women.“It was like play for me. I felt so creative. I had a purpose and felt useful,” Bonnie said.
Living on her own, she had to be resourceful and courageous. She said she used skills and confidence that had always been “lurking inside her,” but now had the chance to come forward. She tells the story of the local police in her small town who detained a friend of hers, Youssef, because he was from Mali and not Gabon. When Youssef went to the train to collect Bonnie’s luggage, the local police forced him to remove his shoes and cut grass outside the police station. After some time had passed, Bonnie went looking for Youssef and found him working with a machete outside. Bonnie confronted the police captain and said that if they did not release Youssef, that she too would take off her shoes and cut weeds with him. As she was one of only two white people in town and a well-respected teacher, the sight of Bonnie cutting weeds would have been enough to disturb everyone and would have reflected poorly on the captain. He let Youssef go. Bonnie said, “I was able to stand up and say no, I won’t let this happen, even though you have a gun.”
In another episode of swagger, Bonnie was washing dishes at her sink when a flash of movement caught her eye. She saw a very poisonous green mamba snake wriggling its way into her kitchen through a screen. She splashed the snake with soapsuds, but that only enraged the snake. Bonnie went to the closet and retrieved her machete. She was thinking, “It is you or me!” and proceeded to chop the snake’s head off. Later, when she went to town to get some gasoline, which she had heard deterred snakes, she explained her story to the man at the gas station. He listened carefully and then said in French, “You are an African now.”
Bonnie reflected on her time in Gabon in her book How to Cook a Crocodile: A Memoir with Recipes. It was published in 2010, as the first book by Peace Corps Writers. It’s available on Amazon.
Bonnie had been to Africa once before and felt so at home, she spent many years looking for a way to return. After her service with the Peace Corps ended, she accompanied her friend Youssef to his hometown of Segou, Mali. When a group of women visiting Bonnie’s house there saw a quilt that she made, an experienced seamstress asked her, in French ”What is this?” Bonnie replied “Le Patchwork.” The seamstress said, “We must learn how to do that,” and Bonnie’s next project was born.
She worked for nearly three years with a group of women producing quilts that can be sold. Bonnie hopes that as the quilts find an outlet, the project will turn into an economic development opportunity for the women of Segou.
During her time there, Bonnie learned that though Mali is now one of many “poor” countries in West Africa, it was once a 
large, proud kingdom. Many African Americans, perhaps, could trace their roots to that kingdom, from which countless people were kidnapped for the slave trade. Weaving together the story of quilting in Mali and the connection with America, Bonnie has written a new book called How to Make an African Quilt.The book has just been released by Nighthawk Press and is available through Amazon as well.
After her time in Africa, Bonnie wanted to share her experiences and help dispel the common image that many have of Africans as poor, starving and in need of saving. “The African women I worked with are some of the strongest people on earth, in my opinion. My new book is dedicated to ‘African women who are the hope,’” Bonnie said. For more on Bonnie Lee Black and her work, visit her website.
