Because Western renderings of the continent (even contemporary ones) have been mired in condescension, benevolent or otherwise, the African artist enters a distorted frame. The psychic toll of challenging historically racist depictions—those that originated during colonial eras but still proliferate now—disturbs the work of many photographers from the continent. “I want to reach the point where we are not burdened with this thing called African photography and the unfair expectations of it,” the South African photographer Gulshan Khan recently told The Washington Post. “I say this not because I am not proud to be African but because there is a freedom, I think, that comes with being able to photograph anything without having to correct or respond to the wrongs of the past.”

Iduma’s work constitutes an unburdening in this sense. The book can be read as a corrective of sorts, but not because it posits this auxiliary function as the most important pursuit of African art. Like the contemporaneous work of the Nigerian Malaysian siblings Akwaeke and Yagazie Emezi, A Stranger’s Pose presents an alternate viewpoint of the continent quietly. Where Akwaeke Emezi harnesses the potency of indigenous spiritual practices through fiction set in various corners of the diaspora and Yagazie Emezi disarms with regal portraiture, Iduma upends monolithic views of Africa through the arresting specificity with which he describes his travel experiences. The book is immersive; it looks inward. It revels in the small moments that constitute a journey, in the many chance meetings that slowly add up to something resembling a family.

In one such instance, Iduma reunites with Egwu, an acquaintance from his teenage years, in Umuahia, the capital city of Abia state in southeastern Nigeria. Their first meeting in 11 years, the encounter is fraught with the nervous energy of mutual appraisal. The men marvel at each other and exchange pleasantries, but Iduma’s true reconnaissance begins out of the other man’s sight. It starts with photographs:

Later, alone, I browse his photos on Facebook. He works with a government paramilitary organisation. In many of the photos he poses with a gun, and underneath the photos he has written “Black Boy.” I am amused by his outrageous showmanship. But I am, in fact, envious. Of how divergent our lives remain, for while I amble along, moving from place to place, he holds himself with steadiness, as self assured as the boy who helped negotiate for my shoes and wristwatch.

Here, Iduma troubles the very idea of stillness, of staticity—on the continent and within people themselves. The two men have drifted away from each other, and Iduma has drifted away from the place that first brought them together. Boys who once shared the same stomping grounds have become men whose lives seldom intersect. Iduma’s boyhood friend may very well remain as confident as he was during their youth—but the writer slyly notes the imperfection of this assessment. The gun-toting photos function as evidence of either Egwu’s confidence or its facsimile. By posing for a photograph, Iduma suggests, the subject participates in—or challenges—his own projection.

Weaving his book together with this batik fabric of human interactions, Iduma reaches toward freedom—for himself, for the genre, and for depictions of the continent writ large. “I hoped … that the cities appeared untethered to their countries—an atlas of a borderless world,” he writes in one email to an unnamed relative. The effect is liberating. A Stranger’s Pose resists the rigid structure of travelogues. It refuses to organize its insights by region, activity, or season. It dispenses with these discrete categories in favor of a lofty premise:

I can recite distances

by heart feet memory



I can tell wanderlust

rounded as the eyes



A walking eye sees itself blind

A roving leg crumbles into a pause



The only thing a man needs

is a suitcase and a soul.

It is a somber relief that the book goes on to challenge this assertion, too. A Stranger’s Pose doesn’t fall into the glitzy category of African writing sometimes labeled “Afropolitan.” No jets zoom between Lagos and London to usher Iduma into the upper echelons of African diasporic society. Iduma takes care to complicate the pull of migration both throughout the continent and beyond. In Rabat, the Moroccan capital, Iduma contrasts the discomfort he feels when failing to communicate adequately in Arabic with the acute danger he knows this deficiency would entail for black Africans traveling through the North African country:

I wore my language deficiency like a veneer, like gauze, like stratum. Underneath was tangible communication, out of reach. Yet I did not bemoan this. My deficiency was benign in comparison. For migrants arriving in Morocco from countries south of the Sahara who have to make a living or wait almost interminably for a better for life, to acculturate is to survive.

This moment of intra-continental reckoning is a sobering contextualization. There can be no “African travel writing,” of course, without an acknowledgment of how unevenly the continent’s internal borders are policed. What can “Africa” mean to the African who cannot traverse it freely? A Stranger’s Pose doesn’t offer a clear answer, but Iduma’s words and photos alike underscore the futility of attempting to capture a continent’s depth in one flourish. Operating in concert, the different mediums urge the reader to find satisfaction in the boundlessness of individuals.



A Stranger’s Pose complicates assumptions of kinship—between people of African descent, between photographer and subject, and between an artist and his audience. The only salve, Iduma suggests, is to keep moving.

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