"People are trapped in history," James Baldwin observed in his 1953 essay Stranger in the Village, "and history is trapped in them." It is a sentiment that serves as the spiritual and intellectual bedrock for Ekow Eshun’s sweeping new book, The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them. In this masterful work of creative nonfiction, the British-Ghanaian writer, curator, and broadcaster maps the historical and psychological contours of Black masculinity in the West. Eshun posits a searing thesis: "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."
Rather than offering a dry, chronological survey, Eshun orchestrates a polyphonic narrative, weaving together biography, historical record, memoir, and speculative fiction. He focuses his lens on five historical figures who traversed disparate eras, geographies, and disciplines: the nineteenth-century Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge, the polar explorer Matthew Henson, the Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, the American civil rights leader Malcolm X, and the British professional footballer Justin Fashanu. Through these men, Eshun constructs an intimate cartography of exile and belonging, illustrating how each was forced to navigate a world fundamentally designed to misperceive them.
In a literary landscape often dominated by rigid generic boundaries, The Strangers is a formal triumph. Eshun employs a second-person perspective - addressing his subjects as "you" - that radically collapses the distance between the archive and the reader. It is an act of historical empathy that, as Christienna Fryar wrote in a review for The Guardian, constitutes a "thrilling affront to the archives that exclude them." By stepping into the void where conventional historical records fail, Eshun gives interiority to men whose inner lives have historically been flattened by racism, exoticisation, or institutional neglect.
The Burden of the Stage: Ira Aldridge
The book opens in the nineteenth century with Ira Aldridge, an African American who fled the virulent racism of his homeland to find fame on the theatrical stages of Europe. Born in New York in 1807, Aldridge emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he became celebrated for his commanding performances as Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear, ultimately playing to royal courts in Prussia and Russia. Yet, as Eshun painstakingly details, Aldridge's success was perpetually shadowed by the racial prejudice of his era. In the UK, where he spent much of his adult life, theatre critics frequently weaponised racist tropes to diminish his craft, unable to separate the Black man from the characters he inhabited.
Eshun uses Aldridge to explore the broader, existential condition of performance that Black men are subjected to in white-majority societies. In one of the book’s most poignant speculative reflections, Eshun attributes a chilling realisation to the actor: "All blacks in this country are condemned to be performers." For Aldridge, the stage was not merely a vocation; it was a microcosm of a society where Black life required constant code-switching, modulation, and the donning of masks to survive the white gaze. His physical exile in Europe mirrored a deeper, ontological exile - a persistent state of being the "stranger" in the room, no matter how rapturous the applause.
The Edge of the World: Matthew Henson
From the gaslit theatres of Europe, Eshun shifts the narrative to the unforgiving ice of the Arctic, chronicling the life of Matthew Henson. Henson was the indispensable companion to Robert Peary during their 1909 expedition to the North Pole. Despite Henson's fluency in the Inuit language, his mastery of dog-sledding, and his pivotal role in reaching the Pole, he was systematically sidelined in the historical narrative, while Peary claimed the glory and the gold medals.
In Eshun’s hands, Henson’s journey is not merely an adventure story; it is a profound meditation on physical and social isolation. The frozen expanse of the Arctic becomes a powerful metaphor for the hostile, freezing environment of Jim Crow America that Henson left behind. Yet, even at the very top of the world, Henson could not escape the gravitational pull of white supremacy. He was a stranger in his own country, a stranger among the Inuit with whom he formed deep bonds, and ultimately, a stranger to the history books that erased him. Eshun's reconstruction of Henson's inner life rescues the explorer from the margins, repositioning him not as an appendage to white discovery, but as a man seeking autonomy in the most extreme environment on Earth.
The Architecture of Alienation: Frantz Fanon
If Aldridge and Henson navigated the physical and social manifestations of racism, Frantz Fanon dissected its psychological architecture. The Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher is a towering figure in postcolonial studies, renowned for seminal texts like Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Eshun approaches Fanon not merely as an intellectual titan, but as a man intimately acquainted with the psychic toll of colonialism.
Fanon’s realisation that the French Republic, which he had fought for during the Second World War, viewed him not as a citizen but as a colonial subject, triggered a profound intellectual and personal crisis. Eshun delves into Fanon's time in Algeria, where his psychiatric practice exposed him to the devastating mental health consequences of French colonial violence. By writing Fanon in the second person, Eshun forces the reader to confront the visceral reality of "sociogeny" - Fanon’s concept that the Black man's alienation is not an individual neurosis, but a condition imposed by a racist society. Fanon’s life, cut tragically short by leukaemia at the age of thirty-six, serves as the intellectual fulcrum of The Strangers, providing the theoretical vocabulary for the alienation experienced by the other four men.
The Fire and the Transformation: Malcolm X
Malcolm X is perhaps the most heavily documented figure in Eshun’s quartet, yet The Strangers approaches him from an angle that feels startlingly fresh. Eshun is less interested in the public icon of the Civil Rights era than he is in the man's relentless process of self-invention. From Malcolm Little to Detroit Red, from Malcolm X to el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, his life was a series of profound transformations, each a rejection of the identities forced upon him by a white supremacist society.
Eshun captures the intense vulnerability behind Malcolm’s fiery public persona. He explores the trauma of his father’s murder and his mother’s institutionalisation, events that violently unmoored him in his youth. Malcolm's subsequent embrace of the Nation of Islam, and his eventual pivot toward orthodox Sunni Islam and Pan-Africanism, are framed as a lifelong quest for a sanctuary - a place where he was not a "stranger." Eshun’s portrayal is deeply moving, reminding us that Malcolm X’s radical politics were born from an intimate, agonizing search for an authentic self free from the distorting lens of the white gaze.
The Tragedy of Visibility: Justin Fashanu
The final portrait in the book brings the narrative into recent British history with the tragic story of Justin Fashanu. In 1981, Fashanu became Britain’s first million-pound Black footballer; in 1990, he became the first professional player in the country to come out as gay. Fashanu navigated an intersection of anti-Black racism and virulent homophobia that proved ultimately devastating. He was relentlessly hounded by the tabloid press, ostracised by the football establishment, and publicly rejected by his own brother, fellow footballer John Fashanu.
Eshun’s treatment of Fashanu is perhaps the most heartbreaking section of the book. In the hyper-masculine, notoriously conservative world of 1980s and 90s British football, Fashanu was the ultimate stranger. He could not perform the acceptable version of Black masculinity that the public demanded. Eshun meticulously documents the hostility of the terraces and the cruelty of the media, culminating in Fashanu’s suicide in 1998. By including Fashanu alongside figures like Fanon and Malcolm X, Eshun expands the definition of historical importance, arguing that Fashanu’s struggle for the right to exist in his totality is as politically significant as any anti-colonial manifesto.
Reclaiming the Narrative
What unites these five disparate lives is Ekow Eshun’s extraordinary capacity for empathy. As a former director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the curator behind the acclaimed exhibition In the Black Fantastic, Eshun has long been preoccupied with how Black identity is constructed, contested, and reimagined. In The Strangers, he turns his curatorial eye inward, weaving reflections on his own experiences as a Black man in Britain and the international art world. These autobiographical interludes ground the historical research, reminding the reader that the legacy of the "stranger" is not relegated to the past; it is an ongoing reality.
Booker Prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo recently described the book as "thrilling and ingenious, propulsive and genre-defying." It is a description that captures the kinetic energy of Eshun's prose. He is not merely recording history; he is interrogating the very nature of the archive. When the historical record is built by those in power, it inherently distorts or erases the lives of the marginalised. Eshun’s speculative leaps - his willingness to imagine the unrecorded thoughts of Aldridge in a European dressing room, or Henson on the Arctic ice - are necessary acts of literary reparation.
For readers engaged with our literature section, Eshun’s work represents a vital evolution in biographical writing. It challenges the objective pretence of traditional biography, proving that sometimes, fiction and imagination are required to tell a deeper truth. Similarly, those who follow our contemporary art coverage will recognise Eshun’s enduring commitment to showcasing the complexity and brilliance of Black expression.
The Strangers is a monumental achievement. It is a book about the violence of misperception, the exhaustion of constant performance, and the heavy price of excellence. It stands as a profound assertion of survival. In charting the lives of Aldridge, Henson, Fanon, Malcolm X, and Fashanu, Ekow Eshun has created a space of belonging for men who were denied it in their lifetimes. He has taken the "stranger" and, finally, brought him home.
