There is a moment early in The Strangers when Ekow Eshun describes taking a Brillo pad to his own face at the age of nine, scrubbing at his skin in an attempt to erase its blackness. It is a brief, devastating image – and one that sets the tone for a book that is as much an act of self-excavation as it is a work of historical rescue. Published by Hamish Hamilton in September 2024, with a US edition from Harper following in July 2025, The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them has been longlisted for both the Gordon Burn Prize and the Jhalak Prize, and received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews, which called it “an inventive approach to Black lives that brings five – and many more – figures out of the shadows.”
Eshun, 57, is a British-Ghanaian writer, curator and broadcaster of Fante heritage, born in London to a father who worked at the Ghanaian High Commission before the family fled political turmoil in 1966. He spent three childhood years in Accra before returning to Kingsbury, North West London. Over three decades he has been a trailblazer in British cultural life: the first Black editor of a major UK magazine (Arena, 1997), the first Black director of a major arts institution (the Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2005–2010), and since 2020, Chairman of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group in Trafalgar Square. Vogue has described him as “the most inspired – and inspiring – curator in Britain.” His curatorial projects, including In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery in 2022 and The Time Is Always Now at the National Portrait Gallery, have explored the representation of the Black figure with a rigour that his writing now mirrors.
The Problem of the Archive
The central dilemma of The Strangers is epistemological: how do you write the interior life of a man who left no diary, no confession, no recorded thought? Toni Morrison argued that Black lives are “spoken of and written about as objects of history, not subjects within it.” Eshun confronts this problem head-on, choosing five men separated by centuries and continents – Ira Aldridge, Matthew Henson, Frantz Fanon, Justin Fashanu and Malcolm X – and writing about them in the second person, using “you” as a conduit for empathy rather than mere pronoun.
This technique is not ornamental. It is structural. As Colin Grant observed in The Guardian, Eshun writes “so intimately that ‘you’ becomes a proxy for ‘I’.” The result is what the author himself calls “creative nonfiction” – a hybrid form that blends archival research, speculative interiority and memoir. It is an approach that will vex purists. In the chapter on Ira Aldridge, the pioneering 19th-century Shakespearean actor, Eshun attributes to him the thought: “All blacks in this country are condemned to be performers.” There is no record of Aldridge ever saying this. Eshun is not hiding the speculation; he is using it to reach a truth that the archive cannot supply.
Ira Aldridge and the Burden of the Stage
Aldridge is perhaps the least known of Eshun’s five subjects, and arguably the most revealing. Born in New York City in 1807, he trained at the African Grove Theatre – the first resident African-American theatre company in the United States – before emigrating to England in 1824, fleeing a country where Black ambition on the stage was met with violence. He made his London debut at the Coburg Theatre in 1825 and went on to perform Othello, Macbeth, King Lear and Shylock across Britain and continental Europe, becoming one of the most celebrated Shakespearean actors of the 19th century. He was the only actor of African-American descent honoured with a bronze plaque at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Yet Aldridge’s achievement came at a cost. London audiences were divided; critics resented “a full-blooded Negro, incarnating the profoundest creation of Shakespeare’s art.” Eshun captures the paradox without flattening it: Aldridge’s Othello “causes only revulsion” in the minds of those who cannot see past his skin, yet the actor himself responds not with rage but with grief. “You feel only grief,” Eshun writes. “The weight of this man’s story bears down on you.” Aldridge died suddenly while on tour in Łódź, Poland, in 1867, buried with honours in a foreign country he had made his home.
Matthew Henson and the Stolen Summit
Matthew Henson’s story is one of erasure on a grander scale. Born to free Black sharecroppers in Maryland in 1866, Henson went to sea at twelve, worked in a haberdashery in Washington DC, and in 1887 was hired by Robert Peary as his personal valet. Over the next two decades, Henson accompanied Peary on seven Arctic expeditions, learning Inuit survival techniques, serving as navigator and craftsman. On April 6, 1909, during their final push for the North Pole, Henson was sent ahead as a scout. He later said he was the first of the party to reach the pole – and that when he and Peary returned to the spot, they found his footprints already there.
Peary returned to take full credit. Congressman Robert Macon dismissed Henson as a “useful Negro tool.” The English reporter Henry Lewis lamented that “the moral support of a white man would have done much toward establishing an unqualified claim of success.” Henson ended his days working as a clerk at the US Customs House in New York, his achievement all but forgotten. It was not until 1944, when he was awarded the Peary Polar Expedition Medal, that recognition began to arrive. He died in 1955 and was reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery in 1988. As the explorer JR Harris has noted: “As a kid growing up in school, I never heard of Matthew Henson. All we heard was that the North Pole was discovered by Robert Peary.”
Fanon, Malcolm X and the Weight of the World
Eshun’s third subject, Frantz Fanon, is the most intellectually formidable. Born in Martinique in 1925, Fanon trained as a psychiatrist in Lyon before working in Algeria during the brutal war of independence from France. His books – Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961) – became foundational texts of postcolonial theory, dissecting the psychic damage of colonialism with a clinical precision that was also, unmistakably, passionate. Eshun depicts Fanon in 1955 “stretched taut with the effort of maintaining a double life,” working in sympathy with Algerian rebels while practising medicine under French authority. Fanon died of leukaemia at 36, exhausted by the contradictions he had spent his short life articulating.
Malcolm X appears in the book’s most emotionally devastating chapter. Eshun focuses on the period after Malcolm’s break with the Nation of Islam, when he travelled to Ghana and caught sight of his former mentee, Muhammad Ali, who turned his back. “Watching Muhammad’s car roar away, you know it’s not possible for real love to disappear, even in the heat of betrayal,” Eshun writes. It is a scene of extraordinary tenderness – and a reminder that the public Malcolm, the firebrand, the uncompromising voice of Black self-determination, was also a man capable of deep private hurt.
Justin Fashanu and the Price of Visibility
The final subject is Justin Fashanu, the British footballer who in October 1990 became the first professional footballer in the world to come out as gay while still playing. Born in London in 1961 to a Nigerian father and Guyanese mother, Fashanu was raised in foster care in Norfolk, rose through Norwich City’s youth system, and in 1980 scored a left-footed curler against Liverpool that won BBC Goal of the Season. In 1981 he became Britain’s first £1 million Black footballer when he signed for Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest – but his career was derailed by homophobia. Clough barred him from training with the team after discovering he frequented gay bars. Fashanu’s transfer value plummeted. He played for a succession of clubs before coming out in The Sun in 1990, fearing he was about to be outed by a tabloid.
The reaction was catastrophic. His brother John – himself a professional footballer – publicly denied Justin’s sexuality, saying he was “just an attention seeker,” and later claimed Justin had never been gay. Fashanu’s niece Amal has since founded the Justin Fashanu Foundation to campaign against homophobia in football. Justin was found dead in London on 2 May 1998, aged 37. A note he had written said that being gay was “too hard.” In February 2020, he was posthumously inducted into the National Football Museum’s Hall of Fame. In February 2026, Queer Britain, the UK’s LGBTQ+ museum, opened a dedicated exhibition of his life.
Eshun does not sentimentalise Fashanu’s story. He situates it within the broader architecture of Black male visibility – the way in which every Black man is, as Eshun writes, “heir to [a] legacy of caricature, which renders him simultaneously invisible and hypervisible.” Fashanu was hypervisible as a footballer, hypervisible as a gay man, yet invisible as a human being in the full complexity of his interior life.
The Stranger in the Mirror
What makes The Strangers more than a group biography is the way Eshun weaves his own story through the lives of his subjects. The Brillo pad anecdote is one instance; there are others – the black bin liner of belongings he dumped when leaving home for the London School of Economics, the years of feeling “misperceived” as a cultural commentator who seemed to transcend race before choosing to address it directly. The poet Lemn Sissay has written: “Ekow Eshun is a genius. He holds a torch where institutions have refused to look and helps us all to see through shadows to the magnificent strangers. His writings on the Black aesthetic are unsurpassed – and my world is a better place because he is writing in it.”
The Strangers is not a comfortable book. It asks its readers to sit with grief, with loneliness, with the specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being constantly seen and never understood. But it is also a book of extraordinary tenderness – a work that insists, with considerable literary force, that the interior lives of Black men are not footnotes to history but the very substance of it. Eshun’s second-person technique does not merely narrate; it inhabits. And in doing so, it performs the act of repair that the archive has always refused.
