In Sweden, Ottilie Abrahams finished her master’s degree and was writing a PhD thesis on the works of Ayi Kwei Armah, a writer from  Ghana.  Ayi Kwei Armah, was born in 1939 in Takoradi, Gold Coast, now  Ghana. His novels deal with corruption and materialism in ‘post colonial’ Africa. He was educated in local mission schools in Ghana before going to the United States in 1959 to complete high school and then did a bachelors degree at Harvard University and a Master’s in Fine Arts at Columbia University.  He worked as a scriptwriter, translator, and English teacher in France, Tanzania, Lesotho, Senegal, and the USA.  Ottilie Abraham’s thesis focused on his first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968).  She was looking at the kinds of coups taking place across Africa immediately after independence and asking “if we all fought for independence why is it that people are regressing?”  Studying Armah’s writing and drawing on her own experiences of cultures of democracy in political movements in her youth, she consolidated her thoughts on self reliance and participatory democracy which she implemented upon return to Namibia after exile.