Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them

The Strangers

Richly imaginative and powerfully empathetic, an intimate portrait of five remarkable Black men, and a meditation on race, estrangement and the search for home. 
 In the western imagination, a Black man is always a stranger. Outsider, foreigner, intruder, alien. One who remains associated with their origins irrespective of how far they have travelled from them. One who is not an individual in their own right but the representative of a type. 
What kind of performance is required for a person to survive this condition? And what happens beneath the mask? 
In answer, Ekow Eshun conjures the voices of five very different men. Ira Aldridge: nineteenth century actor and playwright. Matthew Henson: polar explorer. Frantz Fanon: psychiatrist and political philosopher. Malcolm X: activist leader. Justin Fashanu: million-pound footballer. Each a trailblazer in his field. Each haunted by a sense of isolation and exile. Each reaching for a better future. 
Ekow Eshun tells their stories with breathtaking lyricism and empathy, capturing both the hostility and the beauty they experienced in the world. And he locates them within a wider landscape of Black art, culture, history and politics which stretches from Africa to Europe to North America and the Caribbean. As he moves through this landscape, he maps its thematic contours and fault lines, uncovering traces of the monstrous and the fantastic, of exile and escape, of conflict and vulnerability, and of the totemic central figure of the stranger.

Ekow Eshun is a British-Ghanaian writer, editor, curator, broadcaster, and author of the memoir Black Gold of the Sun, which was nominated for the Orwell Prize for its exploration of race and identity. He writes for publications including the New York Times, Financial Times and Guardian, and has created documentaries for BBC4 and BBC Radio 4. 
 
Eshun was the first Black editor of a major magazine in the UK and the first Black director of a major arts organisation. He has curated exhibitions internationally, including 2023's critically acclaimed, landmark project In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery and the British Film Institute, and The Time is Always Now, a major study of contemporary Black portraiture, at London's National Portrait Gallery (2024). He is currently Chairman of the Fourth Plinth committee, overseeing London's most significant public art programme, and Creative Director of the Calvert 22 Foundation.

Ira Aldridge: trailblazing Shakespearean actor, playwright, abolitionist, acclaimed and feted across nineteenth century Europe. 
 
Matthew Henson: the first man ever to reach the North Pole, after eighteen years of successive attempts. 
 
Frantz Fanon: revolutionary psychologist and political philosopher, a forefather of modern post-colonial theory. 
 
Malcolm X: firebrand leader in the American civil rights movement, an icon in the fight for racial justice. 
 
Justin Fashanu: gifted sportsman and notorious showman, the first professional footballer in the world to come out publicly as gay. 
 
What do these five men, separated by centuries and continents, have in common? The Strangers tells their stories one by one: as pioneers who made history in their fields, and as sensitive, often solitary individuals moving through a hostile world. And it locates them within the vibrant, restless, richly detailed landscape of Black art, culture, history and politics over the past several centuries.

Ekow Eshun

Searching for Home in England and Africa

'Where are you from?'  'No, where are you really from?'  These questions, which he has been asked since boyhood, drive Ekow Eshun to travel through Ghana in search of his roots, and lead him on an exploration of history and belonging, from slavery in Africa and the West to the present day and what it means to be black.  In search of answers, Ekow unearths yet more questions, some shocking contradictions and some long-forgotten truths about his family past...

Ekow Eshun

Black Gold of the Sun

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