Whyteface

Four years ago, a young man named Furo Wariboko woke up one morning in Lagos to find that he had transformed into a white man. Except for his ass. Now well established with a good job, going by Frank Whyte and living in a nicely appointed house in the capital city of Abuja, he is ready to set off on a real vacation—his first trip outside Nigeria.

As Frank travels to Amsterdam, Oslo, and Milan, he finds himself, for the first time in years . . . blending in. His skin is not in the least remarkable. In Amsterdam he befriends his well-meaning but occasionally misguided Airbnb host. There he also meets a Nigerian expat living in America whom he is both delighted to see but who vexes him for reasons he can’t initially identify. In Oslo, he intervenes when a charismatic Kenyan writer is the victim of a racist taxi driver. In Milan he comes upon a woman who might be a distant relative who has survived a treacherous journey of migration. He quickly realizes that he feels most Nigerian when he is outside of Nigeria, and he begins to wonder what it might take to be treated, simply, as human.

Hilarious, sharp-witted, and moving, each in turn and often all at once, A. Igoni Barrett’s Whyteface confronts the absurdities of Europe and the West’s ideas about the global south—both its xenophobic fear as well as its supposedly beneficent charity. It is a heady and absorbing new novel by the writer Teju Cole called “a major talent.”