Furious Passage Through West Africa – By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
Some writers take no prisoners with their verbs and nouns. Adewale Maja-Pearce, author of the new book, Shine Your Eye – In Search of West Africa, (Hurst & Company, London, 2026), has built a formidable reputation of damning all consequences in his expression of the written word. He goes into places where even brave soldiers would not dare to enter, and he tells it all without any buts or ifs. It is such a wonder that the high and mighty rulers of benighted Africa are still allowing him to breathe.
The first surprise of Shine Your Eye for me was seeing that the book which is dedicated to the author’s daughter, Paris Ujunwa Ololade Pearce, has the poem I wrote for her is printed on the dedication page. That’s incidentally the only soft part of this searing book!
The book sets its tone with two quotes from the fire-eating President of Burkina Faso, Capt. Ibrahim Traore, thusly: “These imperialists have just one cliche in their heads. Afrika is an empire of slaves. That’s how they see Afrika. For them, Afrika belongs to them; our land belongs to them; our subsoil belongs to them.” And: “[A] slave who cannot assume his own revolt does not deserve to be pitied.”
Maja-Pearce, who was born in London to a Nigerian surgeon father and a British mother, lives in Lagos, Nigeria. Armed with an MA from the prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University of London, Maja-Pearce has authored acclaimed books, notably In My Father’s Country: A Nigerian Journey, The House My Father Built, and This Fiction Called Nigeria. He has written extensively for The New York Times, Granta, The Virginia Review, Baffler etc. It was while working as the Africa Researcher for the Index on Censorship that Maja-Pearce had the props to undertake tours of many African nations, and he has continued to undertake these African journeys, whence the book Shine Your Eye.
The personal and the collective interweave seamlessly in Maja-Pearce’s compelling narrative of the West African story in Shine Your Eye. He sets forth on his journey with these words: “My last port of call before leaving Nigeria for a two-month tour of West Africa in late 2023 was the Seriki Faremi Williams Abass Slave Museum, named after the man who built it in the 1840s, who had himself been the domestic slave of a merchant named Abass but was later sold to another called Williams.”
The slave memorial bears the legend: “Point of No Return: Journey to Unknown Destination.” According to Maja-Pearce, “There are many depots along the 1,500-mile Slave Coast – the name given by the European traders – between what is now Nigeria and Senegal. Badagry, which exported over one-and-a-half million in total, was the largest, but Ouidah in neighbouring Benin Republic ran it a close second, hence the concrete and bronze Door of No Return arc that was subsequently erected on the beachfront as a memorial.”
Journeying on, in nearby Togo, in the town of Agbodrafo (Safe Harbour), there is the Wood Home, built in 1835 by the Scottish slave trader John Henry Wood, where the slaves were crammed for weeks on end that has now become a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
“In Ghana,” Maja-Pearce writes, “there are over thirty surviving forts, castles and former trading posts that were pressed into service. Two have since been turned into museums.” He stresses that the “slave forts in Ghana are especially popular among African Americans exploring there roots…”
A remarkable presence in Ghana is Rita Marley, widow of the legendary reggae musician Bob Marley. She settled in Ghana in the early 1990s and was in 2000 “installed as a Queen Mother in Konkonuru and given the title Nana Afua Adobea…” She was in 2013 granted honorary citizenship, and was given full citizenship of Ghana in 2019. In the words of Rita Marley, “I see myself still as a Jamaican, but Africa is our roots and I was always looking forward to this transition. Nigeria is more like New York, but Ghana is a lot more like what we expect Africa to be.”
Maja-Pearce harbours grave fears for Nigeria and her unproductive economy, as he avers, “Indeed, it may have unravelled completely by the time you are reading this, and made more likely, not less, by our presumed new president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who perfectly embodies everything that is wrong about the artificial nature of this complex colonial creation – in effect a fiction, as I have written elsewhere – of too many ethnicities, languages and religions. It defies credulity – although it makes a warped kind of sense – that nobody knows his real name, age, state of origin or even which schools he attended.”
As per the personal touch in Shine Your Eye, Maja-Pearce reveals that his father lied about not being married before wedding his 18-year-old love-struck mother. The author bears witness to his father striking his mother once, and then getting married to another woman, a fellow Yoruba.
Maja-Pearce divulges the marked difference in bribe-taking between the Anglophone and Francophone countries – the border officials of the former are almost apologetic while the latter are aggressive and insolent. In one of his travels, Maja-Pearce was locked up in a hell-hole cell in Togo!
A clear depiction of how unsafe Maja-Pearce’s trips are is illustrated thus: “The final leg of my journey took me a good way through the Sahel, which is to say Mali and Burkina Faso but not Niger, which was closed to traffic because of the continuing Islamic emergency that France had been unable – or unwilling- to contain.” Then this: “At just CFA3,750,/f4.50 by coach, the price from Banjul to Bamako was ridiculously cheap given the 800 miles we were about to traverse, compounded by the exceptionally bad state of the roads in most of Mali itself, which was by far most of the journey.”
The creative bonding of the Ivorian writer Veronique Tadjo (Ivorian father, French mother) and Maja-Pearce (Nigerian father, British mother) lends requisite humanity to the furious passage across West Africa by way of “Shine your eye; change don’ come.”
Shine Your Eye – In Search of West Africa by Adewale Maja-Pearce is a highly rewarding tour de force, a contemporary masterpiece.
- Uzoatu is a writer and poet
