The first book by British-Nigerian journalist Jimi Famurewa is a wide-ranging survey of the cultural and economic life of London’s African diaspora. A blend of memoir, social history and reportage, it is made up of nine essays that take in everything from education, housing and policing to religion and cuisine. The general tenor is celebratory: the author waxes sentimental about independent supermarkets such as TM African Foods on Goldhawk Road, where customers can indulge in “unhurried lingering, haggling on price, speaking at volume in thick-accented patois or pidgin or, perhaps, not even in English at all”. Scoffing Nigerian scrambled eggs in West Kensington’s Pitanga restaurant, he experiences a “quintessential Proustian rush” – “I might as well be slumped happily on my mum’s corner sofa, listening to the faint sound of her singing church hymns in the kitchen.”
Famurewa is a food critic by trade, so it’s no surprise that gastronomy features prominently. He interviews the owners of Ikoyi, which in 2018 became the first west African-inspired restaurant to earn a Michelin star, while drawing criticism from some Nigerian customers who felt the food was insufficiently authentic; Chishuru restaurant in Brixton and the Eritrean-inspired pop-up Lemlem Kitchen have incurred similar opprobrium. Such are the pitfalls of cleaving to rigid notions of identity: the nostalgic émigré wants their ancestral culture frozen in aspic, but that’s not how life works. At its worst, that kind of insularity can, as Famurewa acknowledges, breed a mindset of cultural separatism with potentially harmful consequences.
