Shafik Meghji reviews Májà-Pearce’s latest work, a fascinating insight into West Africa across 14 separate countries
In Nigeria, ‘shine your eye’ is a phrase warning you to be alert and not allow yourself to be duped. It is a principle Adéwálé Màjá-Pearce closely follows in his sharply written and strongly argued new book. A blend of memoir, reportage, history, politics and travelogue, Shine Your Eye journeys across West Africa, taking in 14 countries, from Senegal to Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau to Ghana.
Much of the book is made up of the British-Nigerian author’s reflections on past trips to the region, as part of his work as a researcher for the Index on Censorship magazine in the 1990s. He combines these with contemporary accounts and commentary to provide searing snapshots of the countries, their histories and current plights. Along the way, the book addresses issues such as slavery, colonisation, decolonisation, conflict, insurgencies, democracy, dictatorship and much more, as well as highlighting the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of international law, institutions and NGOs.
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In Francophone West Africa, Màjá-Pearce discusses the exploitative ‘cooperation agreements’ imposed by France as a condition of independence on its former colonies: ‘[Only Ahmed] Sékou Touré of Guinea-Conakry courageously opted out of the arrangement on the grounds that “we prefer poverty in liberty than riches in slavery” and was duly punished for his temerity. The three thousand French civil servants who left the country took all their property and destroyed anything they couldn’t move… to send a clear message that failing to sign the agreement would reap the whirlwind’.
In The Gambia, Màjá-Pearce details the country’s recent political travails and the seedy sex trade elements of its tourist industry, which sees ‘over one hundred thousand, mostly middle-aged and elderly Brits out for sun and sex – with women leading the way’. Over in Liberia, he encounters Joshua Milton Blahyi, a notorious general who commanded a rag-tag army of mostly children in the country’s first civil war and then used a sensationalist appearance at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to boast ‘of killing many more people than he did in order to remain the centre of attention’.
Many of the encounters in Shine Your Eye involve journalists coping with crackdowns on freedom of the press. Màjá-Pearce looks back on a lunch meeting with Kweku Baako, deputy editor of a newspaper in the Ghanaian capital Accra, whose account of the brutalities he suffered in detention years earlier is interrupted by the appearance in the restaurant of his first interrogator. ‘Baako fell silent and watched him cross the courtyard. I thought at first that he was understandably fearful of being overheard… but I was soon to understand, as I got to know him better, that someone who has been so close to death can no longer be easily intimidated. In a sense, the worst had been done to him.’
Màjá-Pearce, who was born in London and grew up and now lives in Lagos, also examines his family story. With bracing honesty, he outlines the disintegration of the marriage of his parents, a ‘Lagos Big Boy’ who trained as a surgeon at London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital and a trainee nurse 20 years his junior whose relationship collapse coincided with Nigeria’s independence in 1960: ‘The moment I understood that I wanted to be an author and not a history professor, I found myself writing only about Nigeria and hankering to be back there… Fortunately (and much to my surprise), my father had left me a small [Lagos] property… In other words, he was much more useful to me dead than alive, a melancholy fact but true.’
In personal matters, as much as politics, Shine Your Eye takes no prisoners.
