Radar

The American historian on a mind-blowing book, the sheer beauty of South Africa and and seeing his name come up as an answer on his favourite gameshow.

We visited art galleries and purchased works by local artists and my mother and my partner brought home a lot of spices from a store in Durban. There was some controversy around the film because Dahomey was a major human trading nation and that wasn’t necessarily rendered in the film. This is a novel set during the civil war in the United States, based on an all-black regiment of former slaves. I would recommend it for the sheer beauty of the country, particularly Cape Town. I had the honour of visiting South Africa for the first time last year with my family. It’s hard to say the final season was satisfying, because we wanted the show to continue, but we did enjoy it. But what was fascinating, aside from that, was the sheer humanity of Davis’s character. This is the book I read in 2022 that was the most mind-blowing. The historian Ibram X Kendi, one of the foremost scholars of race in the US, was born in Queens, New York, in 1982. [Viola Davis](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/oct/10/i-can-change-the-way-black-women-are-seen-viola-davis-on-stereotypes-success-and-playing-a-warrior) plays their general and she does an incredible job in that role. This is a devastating indictment of the system. I was in shock!