Shine Your Eye

Shine Your Eye: In Search of West Africa

Adéwálé Májà-Pearce

Hurst, 2026

‘No condition is permanent’ is one of the many popular slogans painted onto the sides of the ‘molue’ buses of Lagos (the word ‘molue’ is said to derive from a Yoruba phrase meaning ‘you will suffer’). The overcrowded, battered yellow vehicles find people sardined into hot metal interiors, leaving others to hang off the doors and out of windows, trying not to lose a limb in the endless stop-start ‘go-slows’ of the great West African metropolis. A Shona proverb from Southern Africa, reflecting much the same experience, goes even further: ‘Everything comes to an end; and what does not end is an unimaginable curse.’

After more than three decades as a researcher and journalist traversing almost all of the 15 countries of the West African subregion, in 2023 the British Nigerian writer Adéwálé Májà-Pearce embarked on the journey of this book to review what has changed for the people of West Africa, crammed as they are into ill-fitting, dysfunctional states handed down – with costs attached – from the former colonial masters to compliant local elites. [Spoiler alert! Things have got worse.] Whether coming up against police and army roadblocks, passing obligatory bribes to border and customs officials, or chancing a detour into impenetrable bush on the back of a motorbike taxi because there is no other way to get through, Májà-Pearce has done the hard miles to bring you news that if you thought Anglophone West Africa was bad, the French are still bleeding the corpses of their former colonies dry. And killing politicians who attempt to oppose them.

Shine Your Eye: In Search of West Africa is Májà-Pearce’s highly personal, no-holds-barred account of his travels in a part of the African continent afflicted with a sense of déjà vu – haven’t we seen military coups before? Haven’t we seen this corruption and poverty? Haven’t we seen slavery? In West African pidgin, ‘shine your eye’ means something like ‘wake up; open your eyes; pay attention; think!’ The writer’s eye is our guide to what can be seen and understood and, on a personal level, felt, of people’s resilience, grief, resignation and protest. People permanently want a better life; and for the life of them, given their ability to persevere in chaotic conditions, they certainly deserve it.

Underlying his analysis of West Africa’s predicament is what Májà-Pearce calls ‘a failure of ideas’ in the anti-colonial struggle and its dream of an independent Africa free from foreign domination. The struggle was fought with ideas about the state and the uses of its extractive, coercive machinery that were Western, not African. No African ideas have yet emerged to overcome the legacies of ‘self-contempt’ and brutal state misrule which disfigure the lives of ordinary people and prevent them from taking responsibility into their own hands. For now, far from developing new forms of self-government or finding other ways to limit state power, the average West African – indeed, the average would-be military ruler, president or prime minister – has only two choices: collude in the system of corruption or suffer. Though Shine Your Eye is full of examples of people who have managed both to collude and suffer.

‘Why should foreigners have Africa’s best interests at heart when Africans themselves show contempt for each other – and therefore themselves?’ the writer asks. It is a question to bear in mind while reading this book, because to look inward – to face oneself – and attempt to answer it is a challenge which reaches deeply into the nature of human history and the elusive search for a better future.

Hurst Publishers: Shine Your Eye: In Search of West Africa

Gabriel Gbadamosi

Gabriel Gbadamosi is a poet, playwright, essayist and critic.