Watipa is the Fire That Doesn’t Burn You.

A few months ago, a close friend called to tell me she had been dismissed from her job as a caregiver, the very job that had sponsored her visa in the UK for four years. The dismissal came suddenly, triggered by an uninvestigated and biased rumour of misconduct that turned out to be untrue. What’s worse, the care home gave her twenty-eight days to find another sponsor.

Twenty-eight days.

How preposterous. What kind of magic was she supposed to perform within that time? Anyone familiar with the UK care system knows that getting a new job as a sponsored worker is far from simple. Onboarding alone can take nearly two months, with DBS checks, references, and training. Securing sponsorship can stretch the process even further. Yet here she was, asked to leave behind a Certificate of Sponsorship, the very document that legally tethered her stay in the country.

That story lived in my mind. It wouldn’t let me rest. And it led to the creation of Watipa.

In the novel, Watipa is a Zambian-Kenyan caregiver, experienced and dependable, quietly strong. She is suspended after a casual kitchen conversation with Uzo, where they joked about British food lacking flavour. It was harmless banter between two tired carers sharing a light moment. But Alina, a Romanian colleague, happened to overhear the exchange. Instead of addressing it directly, she went straight to management, framing it as a cultural insult; to her, they were “two black carers disrespecting British culture.”

Without investigation, Watipa was suspended. Uzo, being new, received only a warning.

Free speech, the last time I checked, wasn’t a privilege reserved for some. It was supposed to be a right, one that comes with respect but also with understanding. Watipa and Uzo’s conversation wasn’t public defamation; it was private talk taken out of context. If Alina had truly been offended, couldn’t she have spoken to them as a colleague? As part of the same team?

But instead, she reported them.

After four years of loyalty and service, Watipa was discarded without a second thought. And so, I wrote her as she is: fire that doesn’t burn you, yet somehow, she was burned by those she called her own.

Watipa represents so many African women I’ve met in the UK: soft-spoken, keen-eyed, deeply weary, yet endlessly resilient. She doesn’t need to lead a protest to be revolutionary. Sometimes, the will to keep going is the loudest protest of all.