One evening, as she sat with her grandmother, the conversation turned to the past. Her grandmother, with a voice softened by age but sharpened by memory, began to tell her a story that had long been kept in silence. In the late 1950s, she said, there was a group of women strong, visionary, unafraid of the pen who met in secret. In a time when women were not expected to speak, they typed out pages that spoke of rights, dignity, and freedom. They preserved culture, they challenged colonial narratives, and they quietly stirred a revolution of words. “We called ourselves Czarina,” her grandmother confessed, her eyes holding the weight of a secret finally released. “Not because we admired foreign queens, but because to us, a Czarina meant something else. It meant The Woman Who Commands Her Own Narrative. It was our way of saying we belonged to no one but ourselves.” The group’s work was silenced in the turbulence of the early 1960s, their typewritten pages scattered, their voices pushed underground. Yet the name Czarina remained a crown they had once dared to wear.
Hearing her grandmother’s words, Kotoria felt an unshakable calling that the voices once carried in secret on typewritten pages could no longer remain hidden in the shadows of history. She was inspired to keep that voice alive, the voice of women who had dared to speak when silence was demanded of them, a voice that had echoed for years and must never be allowed to fade. To her, Czarina would become a vessel of continuity, ensuring that the truths, dreams, and defiance of African women would always be heard, honored, and passed forward without end. By choosing it, was reviving a legacy, bringing back to life the revolution her grandmother’s generation had been forced to bury. And so, Czarina Magazine was born.