'Boom, Phuff.' - An Anecdote from Rex Niven's Nigerian Kaleidoscope

I admit that I currently lack the inspiration for a blog post worth your time, dear reader. I am currently struggling to organise my thoughts and put together an argument to the satisfaction of my collaborator in the lorry art project. And, while I suggested I'd use this blog to organise my thoughts I find that I am not quite at that stage right now. So, in the meantime I keep flicking through various books including, still, colonial and postcolonial memoirs. That may be part of the problem, you say? However, I usually do find it helpful to read widely – even if there is little direct relation to what I am working on at any one point. And, indeed, I do keep stumbling upon potentially useful paragraphs and views while I do that. 

An Aside: Western Clubs in Germany

I have joined a non-fiction writing class to get feedback on my writing, mostly stylistically rather than content wise. And, it's proven to be helpful to have a bunch of native speakers point out when I inadvertently slipped into what we call Denglish – broken English, the German version.

The wonderful Susanna Forrest who runs the group also pointed me to a helpful volume on 'stylish' academic writing by Helen Sword. Last week I tried out one of Sword's advices. She suggested that academic writers include anecdotes into their articles that make the subject more relatable and/or illuminate the author's relationship with the subject. I included a throwaway remark about Western clubs in my native Germany. And, the more I thought about it the more I feel that it’s the intellectually honest thing to do.

History Snippet: Padmore (1944) Black Cloud Over Berlin

I think I mentioned in a recent post that I scrolled through several volumes of the Negro Digest on microfiche the other day. I may also have mentioned that that technology rather frustrated me and that I therefore welcomed the distraction of any article that had even a tangential relation to arts, culture and – I realised flicking through my notes – the history of Nigeria or West Africa. One of them was George Padmore's (1944): 'Black Cloud over Berlin.' (Negro Digest. Vol. 2(12). 75-76.)[1]