Prof Nancy Booker, Dean of the Graduate School of Media and Communication at the Aga Khan University, grew up around intelligentsia. Her grandfather was a professor at the University of Nairobi. There were scores of uncles and aunts in academia, including her mother.
“I saw how hard my mother worked,” she says. “Coming back home in the evening to continue doing house chores on top of preparing for the next day’s class, and I thought, no way that is going to be my life.” She wanted something glamorous, so she went into the media and her career, which has spanned over two decades, eventually brought her to a classroom and largely, to what her mother did.
