Outsiders

A Return-to-Nigeria Reading List.

Illustration of Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease by Edel Rodriguez (2009).

What makes the written history of Africa an exciting area of study is that it is a record of competing yet ever-evolving narratives. A lot of this history is distressing, vicious, to read but the act of engaging with history is analogous to the necessary parting of a veil: you never know what you might uncover but revelation unburdens you of doubt and renders salient what is truly certain. For some time now, I have been interested in the “return to Africa” as a post-colonial inevitability and as something that has very human effects, too. There isn’t anything new about Africans leaving the West for Africa, especially when their departure involves a mission to make some kind of impact on the continent. And this lack of novelty ought to be worrying; for one, it suggests that our continent may be more static than we think. It raises scepticism, therefore and rightly so, towards the fanfare around zeitgeists like “Africa Rising” that emerge and dominate the times even though, curiously, they often aren’t, themselves, African inventions.

In this reading list, I’ve selected several books and essays that have been my companions on my journey back to Nigeria. “intro” provides some background into certain harmful perceptions we still hold, perhaps unknowingly, about Africa — such as that Africa is the antithesis of Europe and of civilisation — and sets what I believe is a good, sober tone; “reading” explores the complexities involved in returning to a place once left behind. Set mostly in Nigeria, the section comprises beauty but also tragedy, a lot of wondering and wandering; and “outro” contains works that I consider timely, given the global response to recent crises in Africa, and crucial to how, as Africans, we conceive of our place in the world.

The hope is to establish, through this collection, that the process of returning to one’s native-land is long, difficult and multifaceted in that it comprises physical, psychological, economic, cultural and intellectual, and visceral motions that may not cohere with one another. The propensity for internal conflict is, in other words, real; and displacement, in the context of returning, may not be entirely geographic. A friend of mine puts it better that sometimes, as returnees, we discover that we are perpetual outsiders, doomed to be foreigners both abroad and at home. This reading list, which spans essays, fiction, travelogues and reportage, and in which I have prioritised flow and consistency of argument over chronology, is my way of asking why and how come.

intro

1. Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness (1899)
2. Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1977). Available in Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (1988). Also here
3. Patrick Brantlinger, Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent (1985). Read here

reading

“The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home.” — Italo Calvino

“It was in England that Nigeria first became more than a name to him.” — Chinua Achebe

1. Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (1960)
2. Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (1966)
3. Teju Cole, Everyday is for the Thief (2007)
4. Noo Saro-Wiwa, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (2012)
5. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)
6. Albert Camus, Return to Tipasa (1954). Read here
7. Alain Mabanckou, The Lights of Pointe-Noire: A Memoir (2015)
8. Akwaeke Emezi, Who Will Claim You? A Memoir of Placelessness (2015). Read here
9. Ayo Sogunro, Everything in Nigeria is Going to Kill You (2014). Read here

outro

1. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1963): Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre (read here) x Chapter IV: On National Culture
2. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Race in the Modern World: The Problem of the Colour Line (2015). Read here
3. Ibrahim Shaw, “The West’s Reporting of Conflict in Africa”, African Quarterly, 46, 3 (2006)
4. Karl Maier, This House Has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis (2002)
5. Wole Soyinka, A Climate of Fear: The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanised World (2004): Chapter I: A Changing Mask of Fear