Description

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023: TRAVEL

China today is a land of opportunity for African people blocked from commerce with most of Europe and Northern America. It is also an intersection of racism and prejudice.

Noo Saro-Wiwa goes in search of China’s ‘Black Ghosts’, African economic migrants in the People’s Republic. Living in clustered communities, they are key to the trade between the continents. Her fascinating encounters include a cardiac surgeon, a drug dealer, a visa overstayer and men married to Chinese women who speak English with Nigerian accents. This is a story of intersecting cultures told with candour and compassion, focusing on the shared humanity between the sojourner and their hosts.

Publisher Review

A gripping examination of a little-known land: the one Africans occupy in China or, more accurately, in Guangdong. Who knew? Noo Saro-Wiwa has found a fine subject and covers it nimbly. This is a revealing book -- SARA WHEELER Black Ghosts is a marvellous yet unlikely book, travel with a theme, the revelation of modern China by investigating the underclass of African immigrants - highly trained doctors as well as rascals and rappers. Noo Saro-Wiwa is a brave and resourceful traveller-interrogator - outstanding in the so-called travel writing genre -- PAUL THEROUX Gutsy and determined, perhaps cut from the same cloth as her subjects, Saro-Wiwa succeeds in getting her story. The reader cannot help but be filled with admiration * * Perspective * * Praise for Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria: Her gifts lie in her keen eye for the sights, sounds, souls and insanities of contemporary Nigeria, and in her ability to recreate these. The book is a breathless chronicle of diversity . . . Her encounters are at once full of pathos and brightness * * Independent * * Noo Saro-Wiwa's double advantage is to understand personally the mindset of Nigerians as a distinct ethnicity while reporting back to us as an acculturated Westerner . . . she writes with a candid humour that sharply colours the pains and pleasures of homecoming * * The Times * * What Noo Saro-Wiwa illuminates in her compelling account of a five-month journey around the land of her birth is how it feels to be a Nigerian today . . . The author's strength is that, although her patience is worn thin by all the scamming, scheming and privation, she never reaches the end of her tether. Instead, her anger dissolves into solidarity with a people she knew hitherto only from dreaded childhood holidays * * Financial Times * *