The Penguin Podcast: Episode 2 – Black History Month

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Authors featured in this episode

Transcript of this episode

Rhianna Dhillon:

Hello, I'm Rihanna Dillon, and this is the Penguin Podcast with another Ask Penguin episode. Thank you so much for joining us. Every episode we take you inside the action here at Penguin Books where I go in search of the answers to all of your reading and publishing related questions. From our very cosy, very book filled studio, we'll chat with authors and editors finding out what makes them tick and what's on their reading list. To send us a message or ask us a question, you can email Penguin podcast@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk or click the link in the show description to go straight to the podcast page. On that link, you'll also find details for all of the books we've talked about as well as transcripts for every episode. So don't worry if you don't have time to jot everything down. We've done that for you.

It's currently October in London, which means that this episode coincides with one of the UK's most important cultural events, Black History Month. Each year, this month is all about celebrating and commemorating moments in history, achievements and contributions that Black people have made. So to mark Black History Month here on Ask Penguin, I'm on a mission to discover some of the trailblazing books by the Black authors that we should all know about, which means that I get to have little wander around the offices and speak to some of the fabulous people who work at Penguin. Let's go.

Lucy Anderson:

Hi, I am Lucy Anderson. I work in the social impact team in the brand department.

Rhianna Dhillon:

Brilliant. We're asking everybody today, what is your favourite book by a Black author?

Lucy Anderson:

Oh, it's going to be so classic, but it's Mallorie Blackman's Naughts and Crosses. I just absolutely love it. I remember reading it when I was younger and just thinking it was so well written and such an interesting perspective on the world. So yeah, it's got to be that one.

Rhianna Dhillon:

So for those people who haven't read it. Why did it have such an impact on you?

Lucy Anderson:

I think it is part of love story, which is when you're a teenager it's quite interesting to read, but it's also set in, I see as a dystopian world where roles are reversed and you see it as racism reversed. And when I read, I remember thinking, it just really showed you how ridiculous racism is. So I think it sort of brought that home to me in a way. And it's just a really great read with so many different themes and topics. She's just an amazing author and the whole rest of the series is great as well.

Rachel Deeley:

I am Rachel Deeley. I'm a digital editor on the content team.

Rhianna Dhillon:

And what is your favourite book by a black author?

Rachel Deeley:

It's really tough choice, but I've recently been reading James Baldwin in light of the centenary of his birth, and I just found Giovanni's Room such an astonishing read. I was familiar with some of his work as an essayist and obviously the powerful place he holds instead of the cultural and political context, especially in America's history. But Giovanni's Room really shows his prowess as a novelist as well as a fiction writer and putting himself in the shoes of a different kind of experience.

Rhianna Dhillon:

What is Giovanni's Room about?

Rachel Deley:

So it's about, interestingly, the narrator writes from the point of view of a white man who's essentially exploring his sexuality alongside being engaged to a woman who's kind of on her own travels around Europe. He's an American man who's sort of in Paris, and he's sort of falls in with an, let's just say, interesting crowd of men in Paris's sort of subculture scene, I suppose. And he sort of forms this interesting, quite tumultuous relationship with a man named Giovanni. And it's just a really interesting sort of insight into human relationships, the social and cultural context of the time, and I'd really recommend it, especially if you're new to James Baldwin's work.

Angelo:

My name's Angelo and I work in the social impact team, mainly on the Lit in colour campaign.

Rhianna Dhillon:

Oh, fantastic. Okay. So what is your favourite book by a black author?

Angelo:

It's a tough question. It's what comes to mind is Derek Owusu's That reminds me. It's a beautiful poetic, lyrical book. Yeah, I haven't read anything like it before or since.

Rhianna Dhillon:

So tell us about why it kind of really strikes a chord with you.

Angelo:

I think because as an aspiring writer myself and the style that he chose in the past, I've experimented with that. I wouldn't even know how to describe it, that sort of narration style, obviously not the level of Derek, but just to see that it's publishable and that there's appetite in the publishing industry for writing like that. It's kind of experimental, kind of dreamlike almost. And yeah super lyrical. Super poetic. It just really resonated with me and just some of his phrases and the observations I suppose that he picks up on throughout the novel just really struck me. And yeah, I need to read that for a second time for sure.

Julia:

Hi, so I'm Julia and I'm the head of digital content in the brand team. So my favourite book is Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. I love a story that takes me into a different time period and I love a multi-generational family story. And this one starts with the story of two sisters in Ghana at the height of the slave trade. One of them is sold into slavery and the other one marries a slave trader. And the repercussions of that fork in their paths are played out through the generations and it's got a really powerful and beautiful, very moving ending. And yeah, it's one of my favourite books.

Rhianna Dhillon:

Thank you so much. We might have an Ask Penguin about that a little later on.

At the Penguin podcast, we are really lucky to be able to speak to all sorts of authors to find out more about their work. And my guest today is a multi-award winning broadcaster, journalist, filmmaker, and now author, Zeinab Badawi. Zainab's president of SOAS University of London, amongst many other extraordinary accomplishments. In 2024, she published her first book, an African History of Africa from the Dawn of Civilization to Independence. Zainab, we're so thrilled to have you on the podcast. Thank you for joining me.

Zeinab Badawi:

Thank you so much, Rihanna. Super to be with you. Of course.

Rhianna Dhilon:

I am so impressed by you generally, but also with this incredible feat that you've achieved. You've written an African history of Africa. How on earth did you come to the decision that yes, this is what you were going to dedicate a big portion of your life to writing? Where did the seed of that idea come from?

Zeinab Badawi:

I think it came from a very, very early age. I was born in the Sudan, but I moved to Britain when I was two, going on three years of age. So I've always had a foot in both camps in Africa and in Britain. And I've always felt that in a sense I felt duty bound to kind of be an advocate for Africa because I had the benefit of, as I said, living in both worlds. But this book kind of found me because it was the culmination of a TV series, twenty 45 minute programmes about the history of Africa. Took me seven years to film. I went to 34 African countries and I encountered and interviewed countless African scholars, historians, archaeologists, palaeontologists, you name it. And I felt I didn't do justice to them in the TV series. I came back with their wonderful material interviews and so on. So I thought better write a book, which is what I did. And Penguin Random House, very fortunately published it.

Rhianna Dhilon:

So you had all of these interviews already. Did you then go back and conduct more or were you just kind of going on the research that you'd already conducted during the filming?

Zeinab Badawi:

So I was very lucky that the filming project, because it took such a long time, enabled me to do a great deal of reading, which augmented the interviews that I'd conducted for the TV series. So I didn't do much more in the way of interviewing, but I did do much more research. But what I kept from the TV interviews with the scholars was I kept their perspective, their interpretation of their own history. Rihanna, I felt that it was important to accord these people the respect of telling their own story. And sometimes people when they've read the book said, well, we wanted to hear what you thought about X, Y, z or whatever. But I kind of pushed my ego aside and felt that I was really giving a voice to these people who I really sensed were craving a wider stage.

Rhianna Dhilon:

I actually really love those moments throughout the book when you give them a little description and you kind of bring them alive. Because often if you have a name that might not mean anything to a reader, but just by a kind of really simple one line, you tell us how they were in that moment, they were angry or they were fired up. I think that really adds so much to the colour and the texture of your book.

Zeinab Badawi:

That's a very kind thing of you to say. And I perhaps should have conveyed a bit more of that because what all these people had without exception was passion. Passion for their topic, for their specialty, for their own history. And they were not only talking to me as academics who have really conducted the most incredible research. They really would be at home in any senior common room in any university. They were delighted that they were being given an international public platform to talk about their own region's history. And I think it was that fire in their belly and that the light in their eyes, that was one of the reasons why I felt that I needed to tell the history of Africa from an African perspective. Because for the most part, if you try and find a book about African history in your libraries and so on, a large portion of them is getting much better now. And Penguin Random House have done very well with publishing books by people of African descent, but we have had for a very long time, books written about the continent by people living in other continents. And how strange would that be if you were wanting to read about British history and found that the bulk of the work had been written by researchers in Latin America or Asia or Africa? It would strike you as a bit odd.

Rhianna Dhilon:

I love that you wrote the book that you wanted to read. I think that feels so much at the core of this. So trying to get away from an outsider perspective or a European perspective, what notions were you sort of hoping to challenge throughout?

Zeinab Badawi:

I think that Africa has been viewed for a very long time by the western world as really a continent where you just have coups, wars, conflict, famine, rather limited views of the continent or if people are altruistic, and that's a wonderful characteristic to have, but it has also led to a slight victimisation of Africans and Infantilization where you see them as needy people waiting on the whole for outsiders, be they humanitarian organisations, charities coming to help them from the outside, which robs the Africans of agency. It makes them almost like passive spectators to their own lives. And I think that one arising from a benevolent attitude and the other perhaps from a more ignorant thinking that that is all there is on the continent. It's just suffering and nothing else was something, again, I wanted to challenge with this book because people for the most part look at Africa viewing it in a vacuum. If you were to define the United Kingdom by all its problems, you wouldn't have a holistic view of the country. There are many lovely things going on in this country, but Africa I think has suffered from a pretty one dimensional view. And then of course there's the element of racism towards people of a different skin colour, people who don't look like you, who may speak a different language. So that's another layer.

Rhianna Dhilon:

Where did you decide to start your story from? Because it's quite similar to the beginning of your TV show as well, which I thought was really interesting. So tell us about your decision of right, how am I going to hook the reader in? How am I going to make sure that they are completely with me from the beginning?

Zeinab Badawi:

I mean, I thought long and hard about this, and I did start it from the origins of humankind, which strictly speaking is not African history, it's history of how human beings evolved. But I felt I wanted to start it there because I wanted to just ram it home to everybody that actually we all came out of Africa that is settled, the science is not disputed, that this is where the human story begins. And I thought when we look around us and sometimes see so much of a divided world for so many reasons, I wanted to go back to those early years to just say how we had this undivided past and there's nobody on earth who can't say Africa is not their mother continent. And so I just felt that I wanted to engage everybody to say, look, this is a book for everyone and aren't you curious about the history of the continent of your birth, essentially? So that's why I wanted to start it there.

Rhianna Dhilon:

I mean, it is such an ambitious project because every chapter that you have could easily be its own book. So how did you work with an editor to make sure that you were getting enough through of each areas, each country's history, but also not going too far into it that this book could have been like three times the length.

Zeinab Badawi:

I decided to focus on great moments of African history and looking at some of its great people. So that narrowed the field for me. So for example, in looking at Southern Africa, I looked at Great Zimbabwe because of the marvellous structure there, this sprawling stone complex that was begun in the 11 hundreds, or I picked on fascinating characters like Queen Injinga, who was born in the late 15 hundreds in what is today Angola, and was a very feisty queen and kept the Portuguese on their toes. So that kind of narrowed the field for me. I also wanted to make it a book which touched on every region, north, south, east, west, central Africa. And of course I couldn't do everything and people would admonish me for missing great moments. But I feel that if you read this book, you will come away hopefully having been engaged by it, but should also come away with a much better idea of African history and hopefully you'll be stimulated into wanting to learn more.

Rhianna Dhilon:

One story which made me really tear up was the women of, is it Nder?

Zeinab Badawi:

Yes. A very moving story. It happened in 1819 in November in the Village of Nder, which is now part of modern day Senegal. And that was a story which was related to me by several people in West Africa. And it relates to the fact that the women of this particular village led a very peaceful, relatively prosperous life. And when slave traders, and this is the eastern slave trade of Arabs, and their partners were coming to their village to take away the women because the eastern slave trade, they preferred women to men, unlike the transatlantic slave trade because they make them into concubines and so on. These women preferred mass suicide to die in dignity, as they said, rather than to be subjected to a life of enslavement, essentially becoming sex slaves. So they all went into this massive hut and Nbaka, the kind of lead woman, set fire to the hut, and they were singing as they were dying.

And then they saw one heavily pregnant woman make a dash for the exit, and one of them was going to stop her. And then Nbaka said, let her survive so she can tell our story, tell the people that we, the women of Nder prefer to die with our heads held high rather than have everybody know that we were going to become slaves. So yeah, very moving story. And it's an example, incredible of oral tradition. Oral tradition is very important in gathering an idea of African history, something which a lot of Western scholars ignored, but African historians.

Rhianna Dhilon:

Yeah, I thought that was a perfect example of why this book needs to exist because this isn't a story that is easily found in other pages or online even. That is so much a word of mouth story. And we're coming to the end of the interview, so it's an appropriate question to ask you about the epilogue because for a book like this, it must've been quite difficult to write because how do you sort of conclude such an immense project? What did you want to leave the readers with those final thoughts?

Zeinab Badawi:

I think I wanted to show that if you take the long lens of history as I did, you'll see that kingdoms, empires rise and fall and Sudan, which today is enduring, for example, this most awful conflict. It wasn't always like that by going back to the eighth century BCE before common era, showing how it was probably much wealthier than most places in Europe. So I wanted to show how the long lens of history, it can actually present a different vision. And if you look at Africa in the short term, you have cause justifiably to be quite pessimistic. But if you take the long lens, and by that I mean perhaps even 25 years, in some countries cases, you'll have caused to be much more optimistic. And I gave the reasons why it's a very young, youthful continent. It's the youngest in the world. It's got a large portion of the world's earth minerals, which we need for our technological digital revolutions. So Africa has a strong ace in its hand. It can develop in a technologically advanced way rather than the creaking mature economies of the industrialised world. So there's a lot that I think in the long run makes me optimistic about Africa despite the myriad challenges it faces now. So I just wanted to leave the reader with a sense that looking at it historically, Africa wasn't always the way we see it today with all the problems and challenges and that it won't always be like that in the future.

Rhianna Dhilon:

So what's next for you, Zainab, after this decade? You've published a few months ago? Are you taking a well-deserved break now or have you got other projects?

Zeinab Badawi:

A lot of projects going on, so no rest for the wicked as they say. So some more Africa related projects. And I think also I'd like to reach a younger readership. I think it's very important to get that empathy and understanding about different cultures and so on amongst younger people. So that's also something that I am very keen to do. As the mother of four children, I cast my mind back to when they were children and I would've liked to have had something that I could have told them about the continent of their mother's birth. And so I think I'd like to just carry on spreading the message and using history as a kind of vehicle because in order to address the imbalances and the misperceptions of the present, you can't just start now, you've got to reach back. I'll be doing more of that, I hope.

Rhianna Dhilon:

I can't wait to see what you do next. Zeinab Badawi, thank you so much for joining us on the Penguin podcast.

Zeinab Badawi:

I've enjoyed it thoroughly. Thank you for talking to me, Rihanna. Thank you.

Rhianna Dhilon:

This is honestly one of my favourite bits of the podcast where I get to put your Ask Penguin questions to brilliant people. I have one of those brilliant people in the studio with me right now. Joining me today is Award-winning author and hopefully soon to be friend of the podcast. I feel like we definitely want to get you back. Derek Owusu, welcome.

Derek Owusu:

Thank you.

Rhianna Dhilon:

Okay, so turning to our listener questions now, and I should say that Derek, along with being an author and a prolific reader also works here at Penguin. So we're making you wear all of your hats today, author, reader, and somebody who works in the book industry. So with all of that in mind, the first question that I have is from somebody who says, I love thrillers slash crime and historical fiction, preferably from diverse authors, can you recommend one?

Derek Owusu:

The book that immediately comes to mind is The Confessions of Franny Langton by Sara Collins, which is obviously in a period where enslavement of Africans was rife and Frannie is accused of killing her enslaver and she's trying to prove her innocence. And it is a thriller in the sense that it is the way it's constructed and the, maybe not thriller, but it's kind of got a gothic theme to it. The way it's written is written in that mode. The gothic mode, of course, diverse in terms of Franny is also coming to terms with her sexuality as well and how she feels about women, her identity in the world as well. And there are twists and turns in it that always make for a good read.

Rhianna Dhilon:

I would also recommend Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson, which kind of takes you on a journey. It's sort of like a flashback sort of set in the present day, but then flashes back sort of 50, 60 years to the Caribbean and follows this young woman's journey as she moves to a different country. And there's, I think there's also a TV adaptation of that maybe on Disney plus.

Derek Owusu:

Yeah, I think there is.

Rhianna Dhilon:

So yes, that's another,

Derek Owusu:

Can I say one more book?

Rhianna Dhilon:

Yeah, please.

Derek Owusu:

Just kind of going on historical books. It's not historical fiction in the sense that the person who wrote it was thinking far into the past. It was just a little bit before his time is a book called The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon. Basically just charts the Life of the immigrants to the UK from Trinidad. It is told in with a Trinidadian sing songy accent. I remember before I read it, I tried reading, I couldn't get into it, so I just went on YouTube and listened to Trinidadian people speaking, and then I was able to read it.

The problem with that is that afterwards, every other book I read had a Trinidadian accent in my head, so it took a while for me to get off that, but it's just amazing. It's just basically the life of these people who have come to the UK and what they were expecting versus the reality of what it was. They're saying that they used to think that the streets were paved with gold and they realised that the streets weren't as sparkling as they thought when they got here. But it's a really heartwarming story. It is a great depiction of community as well, and how you had to find your community when you came here or you'd freeze alone.

Rhianna Dhilon:

Thank you. That sounds brilliant actually. Okay, so our next request is I wanted to read something like Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. What would you suggest? So Julia, one of your colleagues earlier recommended this and talked a bit about it already, such an intriguing premise. So tell us what else out there this reader could have.

Derek Owusu:

I mean, there is a lot out there in terms of family sagas novels about families that depict Ghanaian life in the United States or in the UK or in Ghana. But I would have to go with a book called Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi which is probably one of the most, on a sentence level, one of the most beautiful books I've ever read.

Rhianna Dhilon:

That's really telling.

Derek Owusu:

Honestly, and it really is just a story about family, about these two twin girls and their father, who it's not really spoiler, he dies at the beginning of the novel. He has a heart attack and it kind of talks about what leads up to that and then it takes you, what happens after that. But it is just beautifully told and beautifully written. It's hard to explain. You really just kind of tumble into the world of the novel without realising it. I remember when I was reading it for the first time, I didn't realise that I was 200 pages in and late for work because I just picked up. And that's how captivating it is. I think you need to read on the right day because the prose is so intense and it takes a while to get into, but once you get into it, that's it. You're going to be blown away. I'm eagerly awaiting her next novel. It's been 10 years,

Rhianna Dhilon:

Has it?

Derek Owusu:

Yeah, it's been 10 years.

Rhianna Dhilon:

Has she been working on it for 10 years or?

Derek Owusu:

I wanted to DM her and ask her once, but I thought that'd be too presumptuous. But yeah, I'm really looking forward to her next book, but she is writing another book. She has said this, so I'm waiting for that.

Rhianna Dhilon:

You are literally there every day looking

Derek Owusu:

For updates, literally. Yeah, definitely.

Rhianna Dhilon:

I love that. So you need to sort of tuck yourself away with this book and just make sure that you are giving yourself the space to read it.

Derek Owusu:

Absolutely. Just taking in every single sentence.

Rhianna Dhilon:

Don't rush.

Derek Owusu:

Yeah.

Rhianna Dhilon:

And finally, what are you most excited to read next?

Derek Owusu:

That's a great question. What I'm really looking forward to actually is Yrsa Daley-Ward's novel. It's called The Catch and it's coming out next year, early next year, I think. So yeah, look, I'm getting goosebumps thinking about it. Crazy. Because her book The Terrible was like, if I didn't read that book, I wouldn't be a writer.

Rhianna Dhilon:

Oh, really?

Derek Owusu:

Yeah

Rhianna Dhilon:

I was going to say the name sounds familiar. I think it was you who mentioned it.

Derek Owusu:

That book is incredible and it's a strange thing because I remember I had just started working here, and we were going through books that were coming out soon. I didn't know who Yrsa Daley-Ward was, but then I saw the title, The Terrible and automatically was like, I have to read this book. I don't know why, but I have to read it. And I read it in one sitting and then I read it again on the same day. I read it twice the same day.

Rhianna Dhilon:

Wow.

Derek Owusu:

I just became really obsessed with the book, the prose style, the honesty, the rawness of it. It was a memoir. I mean, it was marketed as a storyteller's memoir, which basically means I've taken a lot of liberties with the truth, but I kind of read it as a novel and I managed to speak to her and she's kind of endorsed my work, and I said to her, you should really write a novel. This was maybe like five years ago. Oh my God. Five years ago. Crazy. And yeah, now she's got novel coming out with the same publisher that I published with, Merky books. Yeah.

Rhianna Dhilon:

So this is thanks to you basically that she's written a novel.

Derek Owusu:

Definitely not.

Rhianna Dhilon:

But it is thanks to her that you wrote one.

Derek Owusu:

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, a hundred percent. So I'm really, really excited to read that.

Rhianna Dhilon:

Remind us, what is it called? The new one?

Derek Owusu:

It's called The Catch.

Rhianna Dhilon:

We'll keep an eye out for that one. Derek, thank you so much. That's been really helpful.

Derek Owusu:

Thank you.

Rhianna Dhilon:

My list is getting insanely full. There is so much everything. Every person who comes in here and talks so passionately about a book, it just kind of gets it to the top of my list. And so the top of my list is enormous. But that is everything that we've got time for this episode. And you can find lots of information about the podcast and all of the books and authors that we've spoken about today at www.penguin.co.uk/podcasts. And if you've got a question or just a message for us, you can email Penguin podcast@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk. There's a link in the show notes and it makes it really easy for you to get in touch, and we would love to hear from you. Thank you again massively to Zainab Bidawi and to Derek Owusu for those book recommendations. And thank you for listening. We'll see you very soon. And in the meantime, happy reading.