Adventures in reading, running and working from home

Two books today that take a detailed look at what is actually an issue with colonialism in each case. Both books form part of my Nonfiction November and Novellas in November challenges, in which I’ve sadly lagged this month, but am catching up now! In autumn 2024, I took part in left books publisher Verso Books‘ crowdfunder after they nearly folded and in January 2025, I received the package of five books on race and colonialism that I’d selected: “This Fiction Called Nigeria” was one of them. Of the (ahem) 31 print books acquired in January (including for my birthday), I’ve now read and reviewed 15 (and one is an entry-a-day one I’m in the middle of). “Deep It” came to me about a year earlier; I bought it from the Heath Bookshop and out of the 12 print books I acquired in February 2024 I have now read and reviewed 6 (though I am reading another of them at the moment).

Adéwálé Májà-Pearce – “This Fiction Called Nigeria: The Struggle for Democracy”

(15 January 2025, Verso Books)

The politicians know perfectly well that this fiction called Nigeria cannot survive their depredations that are enabled by the very fact that nobody ever owed allegiance to someone else’s abstraction that we have refused to take responsibility for. This is why they buy houses in Dubai and educate their children in the UK, where they also go when they have a headache, possibly to be treated by a Nigerian doctor trained at some expense at home before fleeing to saner climes. (pp. 184-185)

Written by an essayist and journalist, this book takes us through the history of Nigeria from when it was created as an uneasy mix of several regions that should never have been joined together as a country. This has led to it never experiencing an identity as a country, or, as a consequence, the kind of democracy one would hope for. Different ethnic groups, people of different religions, from different areas, have struggled against one another and it feels like when someone decent has arisen, they’ve either been assassinated or become corrupted.

Through election after election Májà-Pearce shares historical record and collected narratives of grifting, payoffs and election fraud, and there’s no easy answer or happy conclusion as he concludes that the country will never be stable, an actual country or democratic in the form it is in now, without at least devolving power to its component parts. It’s powerful reading these words from an insider (and one also worries for him, I have to say). And it explains the rise and continued existence of the “Big Men” and bandits who plague Nigerian fiction I’ve read.

Adèle Oliver – “Deeping It; Colonialism, Culture and Criminalisation of UK Drill”

(15 February 2024, The Heath Bookshop)

In this process of making known that drill undertakes, confrontation is always necessary. The confrontation of self, others, wider structures and meaning or the absence of it. Rather than being muted by self-preservation under capitalism, drill is emboldened by it, producing some of the most scathing criticism of British society today. (pp. 59-60)

Drill is a variant of Afrodiasporic and Black British rap music which has been blamed for all sorts of crimes in a panic akin to those about rap, grime, etc. Oliver lays out the colonial / racist background to this, and sets out an alternative argument of drill as an art movement and a push back against capitalism in displaying life and economics as they really are (the “making known” of the quotation above). She demonstrates how the genre has permeated modern popular music and backs everything up with a large number of references from sources in sociocultural academia and drill practitioners themselves.

This book is part of independent publisher 404 Ink’s Inkling series “which presents big ideas in pocket-sized books” – and sadly they’re shutting down, so maybe order some books from them while you still can (online shop here or you can get most of their books via Bookshop.org).

These are Books 8 and 9 for Nonfiction November and Books 3 and 4 for Novellas in November.

Two books today that interrogate segregation and integration; while one is modern and the other now historical, they have something else in common, which is that each was bought to help rescue their seller: a bookshop and a publisher respectively! Both books form part of my Nonfiction November and Novellas in November challenges.

I bought “‘Honorary White'”, along with some novels, from the wonderful second-hand and new bookshop, High Street Books and Records in New Mills, Derbyshire, when they put out a distress call asking people to look at their mail order site. Of the ten print books I acquired that month, I’ve read and reviewed two (and given up on two, and one was for reference, so I actually only have four to go). And then in the autumn of 2024, left books publisher Verso Books started a Crowdfunder after their distributor went bust and they nearly folded: in January 2025, I received the package of five books on race and colonialism that I’d selected (there were four sets you could choose from, I think). “In Defence of Barbarism” was one of them. Of the (ahem) 31 print books acquired in January (including for my birthday), I’ve now read and reviewed 14 (and one is an entry-a-day one I’m in the middle of).

E. R. Braithwaite – “‘Honorary White’: A Visit to South Africa”

(09 September 2024, High Street Books and Records)

‘I once read somewhere that prisoners held in solitary confinement spend hours watching ants. I tried that. Do you know what happened? The ant walked away. It had somewhere to go. I have nowhere to go. I No longer think. I am one of the living dead of Soweto.’ (p. 55)

We all know Braithwaite from the iconic “To Sir, With Love” but he wrote several more novels and memoirs, and this one details a trip he took to South Africa in the early 1970s. Just after he heard his books were no longer banned there (he found the film of To Sir was heavily censored for public viewing), he applied for a visa and managed to get one several months later. His disquiet began when he listened to the emigrants in the airport talking about wanting toe scape a range of things including the strikes, the rising cost of living and “competition with Blacks for jobs” in the UK. He finds out pretty quickly that he’s afforded the status of an ‘Honorary White’ to allow him to stay in hotels and travel around without having to carry the horrible pass book the Black South Africans have to use, although he still experiences racism; things are “eased” for him only if he lets his hotel know that he wants to find a restaurant to eat in, etc.

Of course he’s introduced to officials who can show him around, and of course he fears he’s being used as a White woman steers him around the township of Soweto; Black artists and musicians he meets claim the same. He promises to share their points of view and experiences, and obviously does so in this book, so he, and we, feel he does at some points get the honest truth about what is going on. Similarly, the White politicians he’s introduced to feel no shame in showing their hand in front of him, making horrible, racist statements. And the situation bitter and awful, as the quote above shows about Joe, a Black man he speaks to in depth, and the life he’s forced to lead.

It’s so important to read books like this still now, to see how segregation can work to suppress people, turning neighbour against neighbour and destroying trust, in order for a small population to keep a larger one in check. He realises this in his heart as well as his head when he sees a man beaten for the “crime” of running in the street and sees that random violence can strike anywhere, without warning. Reading it, I kept thinking these people have over 15 more years to endure before the beginning of the end of Apartheid. A clear and emotional explanation of a complicated situation.

Louisa Yousfi (trans. Andy Bliss) – “In Defence of Barbarism: Non-Whites Against the Empire”

(15 January 2025, Verso Books)

Culture is a form of gluttony that makes the mind obese and impotent. Barbarianism is a primitive vitality and produces authentic writing, pure creative acts, and poetry. It’s perversely tempting to give it an erudite spin by suggesting that Kateb Yacine is resurrecting Nietzsche’s Apollonian-Dionysian duality in order to express the inner tensions of the creative act – between order and chaos, restraint and hubris: in sort, between culture and barbarism. But such musings belong to the world of comfortable armchairs and earnest chin-stroking that is the very antithesis of the ‘certain barbarianism’ that you have to hang on to if you have ‘things to say’. No, we don’t want to go down that road with his magic formula. (p. 1)

A book described as “defiant” in the back blurb; where the Braithwaite is about the evils of segregation, this is about the evils of integration, using some complicated (to me: Verso’s books are highly political and sociological and use terminology I need practice chewing on) arguments to, I think, say that expecting Black and Brown people to integrate into White French society means them losing their humanity and culture and also being infected by the moral shortcomings of the West: “They are afraid of that part of us that cannot be assimilated, which si to say our history, our culture, and our soul” (p. 9).

She riffs off Algerian writer Kateb Yacine, who calls for retaining “barbarism”, a saying no, a resistance, and uses a variety of resources, from Toni Morrison to contemporary rappers from the banlieus, alternately feted and disdained by society at large, to embellish her thesis. In the last section she interrogates the fact that she’s a woman talking about only men, and how easy it is to fall into the trap of being a nice woman explaining these awful men: her job as she sees it is to report dispassionately, and make things clear.

I think I’m getting this right, anyway, and apologies to the author if I haven’t. It’s an impressive debut and while I was out of my depth here and there, I appreciated getting to read it.

These are Books 1 and 2 for Nonfiction November and Books 1 and 2 for Novellas in November. The numbering will never be so simple again!