I wondered if this country could be my home. I learned that we still had family members living in Nigeria and after travelling to Kenya, Egypt and Madagascar, I went there. When I was 19, I became interested in African history and Black history. I had internalised the racism of British society. So when I was a child, “Africa”, “being African”, was something negative. I knew nothing about this part of my history. I grew up with a Nigerian father who never spoke about Nigeria. In Manifesto, you question the relationship you’ve had with Africa since you were a teenager when you realised your idea of the continent “was a concept that existed only in the imagination of Europeans”. I also visited the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. For Blonde Roots, I read a lot, especially Roots, by Alex Haley. READ MORE Nigeria: A case against resilienceĪs a creator, I don’t want to be a slave to history.
In my writing, I combine the tragic and the comic, in this story as in all my books. Inverting history means taking the risk of shocking people, the risk that some people might think I’m not taking the subject seriously. In the UK, it may seem a little more remote, because slavery materialised mainly in the Caribbean. It’s a story that underpins the whole history of the US, beyond that of African-Americans. It was daring because the transatlantic slave trade is an extremely sensitive subject, even today. In your memoir, Manifesto – On Never Giving Up, in which you describe your career, you confide that “dangerous ideas are the only ones that interest me”. It allowed me to examine the magnitude and absurdity of the forces of slavery, as well as racism today, and its origins. No one had yet proposed this prism of a world where the slaves were the Europeans. And as a novelist, I was looking for a way to take readers in an unexpected direction. Bernardine Evaristo: I wanted to write about the transatlantic slave trade, an important page in world history.
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