Joris Schapendonk, Finding Ways Through Eurospace: West African Movers Re-viewing Europe from the Inside. New York NY and Oxford: Berghahn Books (hb US$135/£99 – 978 1 78920 680 7). 2020, 221 pp.

the image of erstwhile brutal Russian kings. When the protest proper begins in Mary Ann Olaoye’s ‘The Beads to this Prayer’, protesters are envisioned as lambs, as the number of deaths becomes memorable and traumatizing. In ‘Elegy for 20-10-2020 Meteors’, Tayo Aluko could hear ‘[t]he sordid outcry’ by many youths from varied backgrounds, protesting against the brutality of the police with ‘a mounting roar’ (p. 66), but the ‘Dracula Lords’ (p. 67) were on hand to derail the movement. Samuel Ogunkoya’s ‘Redeeming Home’ narrates how, at the point of being killed, protesters’ songs became screams, while the word ‘amen’ could be heard from the bodies of shot youth, signifying how their country had let them down. In ‘Arise O Compatriots, Nigeria’s Call, Obey’, Chinonyelum Anyichie chooses the first line of Nigeria’s national anthem to espouse the unity and comradeship that existed among the protesters until the bullets rained down on them. Tayo Aluko’s ‘Looters on High (#EndSARS)’ describes a rain of bullets that felled young protesters sitting on the tarmac. However, Aluko is convinced that the bloodshed was not in vain. Ibiene Bidiaque’s ‘Bullets’ mourns the dead who were killed by ‘blood-thirsty soldiers’ guns cocked to battle against unarmed singing flag-waving civilians’ (p. 54). Many of the poems also tackle the mourning of lost lives and the aftermath of the protests. Gbenga Adeoba’s ‘Retrospection’ recounts the missing names of people killed by agents of the state. In ‘Fevered Children’, Oladimeji Ogunoye relives the inescapably poignant scenes, describing Nigeria as a nation that ‘feeds on her inhabitants’ (p. 40), with no one inquiring why these deaths took place in the first instance. In a lucid, fevered language that aches over the events of that fateful October day, Sọ̀rọ̀sókè reflects on the consequence of negligence of care. I recommend it not just to literary scholars, but also to Africanists and anyone desiring to know what the heart felt going through that dark period.