Almosst sounds like he was involved in a pay-for play deal.....He did something for that money and I’m betting it had nothing to do with writing or publications.
I think you are spot-on...I was just sitting here thinking about it, when your comment popped up, that was an awful lot of money, regardless where the author might have been born, and writers out of African countries weren’t exactly as rare as diamonds...it looks more like a form of money-laundering.
If Ayres needed to be paid, how would they go about it? Sniff sniff...Channel it through the fictitious author? Wild guess.
It was a simple matter of the agency being enamoured of the concept. The concept being the ‘journey in black and white’ from a Kenyan birth to the President of the Harvard Law Review.
Not everything is a conspiracy. The agency simply fell in love w their Kenyan-born, mixed-race Harvard law sensation, and made one fatal miscalculation. They didn’t think a person could become president of the Harvard Law Review sans writing ability. You can’t really blame them for that. Obama was the first, and probably last, talentless president of that publication.