This week I’m going to move towards reviewing a 2022 book by Dipo Faloyin; “move towards”, because I’ll begin with a meander, and because Africa is Not a Country is a long book (350 pages) in very small print which will take me quite a time to get under my already too-tight belt.
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The author is a youngish Nigerian journalist, born in Chicago, raised in Lagos, and now living in London—in other words he is, to use a much-contested term, an Afropolitan. To quote the note on the author that prefaces his book, he is “a senior editor and writer at VICE, where his work has a specific focus on culture, race and identity across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.”
I confess I had to look VICE up on Google — turns out it’s a Canadian / American magazine focussing on lifestyle, arts, culture and news / politics. It describes itself as “the definitive guide to enlightening information” (at which point I thought: “hey! VICE is confusing itself with me!”)
The sub-title of Dipo Faloyin’s book is “Breaking Stereotypes of Modern Africa.” Because my readers are an intelligent bunch (and patient, too, as they put up with my rambling backwards and forwards), I’m sure they know what a stereotype is.
In the case of Africa, it’s the assumption that Africa is not, as Faloyin points out, a continent made up of 54 countries, 2000 languages and 1.4 billion people, but simply, crassly, just all one thing, and a bloody horrible thing at that: the home of starvation, mosquitoes and military coups.
One of the most appalling speeches made by the despicable Donald Trump when he was President of the USA began with a reference to “shit countries like Haiti and Africa”, exposing his ignorance of the size and (in so many respects) diversity of the continent of Africa.
As an aside (or an aside within an aside) we should all be quaking in our shoes at the possibility that later this year we may find Trump not in prison, where he belongs, but back in the Oval Office, in charge of the most powerful country in the world. With one of the other super-powers, Russia, still run by the mass murderer Putin, Trump’s snuggle-buddy, this is a terrifying prospect.
But back to Faloyin. Or not quite. When his book arrived through the post, I was a little startled, as I thought I’d ordered a different book, namely, You’re Not a Country, Africa by Pius Adesanmi. My mistake—I had been out of focus. But hence, before getting down to reviewing the book that’s actually on my desk, the one by Faloyin, I’ll talk about Adesanmi for a bit.
A Nigerian scholar, poet and satirist, Pius Adesanmi died at the age of 39 in the Ethiopian Airlines plane crash of 2019. I want to point out that the crash was not the fault of the airline, which has an excellent reliability record, but of the plane manufacturer Boeing, who were subsequently accused of skipping safety checks on new engines and have still not been held to account for this.
That’s unbridled capitalism for you—the sort that Trump thrives on.
As an aside within an aside within an aside (at which point my long-suffering editor pops another headache pill) I’ll talk a bit about my years of collaboration with Pius—one of the most privileged experiences of my life.
After an initial meeting in Joburg, where we conducted a roundtable discussion on African literature with the author Stephen Gray, Pius and I got to know each other well, as we co-edited two volumes of essays on modern Nigerian literature and became good buddies in the process.
Pius’s poetry collection, The Wayfarer, is terrific, and he authored two collections of satirical pieces, one in Pidgin (Naija No Dey Carry Last) and one in English, the afore-mentioned You’re Not a Country, Africa).
To fill you in a bit more, I’ll quote a memorial tribute I wrote when he passed:
“Pius came as a visiting professor to my base at the time, the NUL, and I paid a return visit to his base then, the State University of Pennsylvania. We struck up an immediate friendship, staying in each others’ houses, teasing each other without inhibition, and trying, without much success, to limit our wine consumption. Pius proved to be a very fine cook, taught by his mother, which enabled me to treat my friends to feasts of jollof rice. Somehow amidst all of this we did get our editorial work done.”
So there we have it. First off, next week, I’ll get around to reviewing Dipo Faloyin’s book—unless, that is, more asides occur to me (I can hear my long-suffering editor groaning “please let them not.”)
To be continued
Chris Dunton is a former Professor of English and Dean of Humanities at the National University of Lesotho.
