Harare Review of Books

192 pages.

First published on August 2, 2022.

Genre: Literary Fiction.

This first appeared in The Sunday Long Read, August 14, 2022 — Issue #354.

“One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.”

With that opening line, Hamid introduces us to Anders, and to a town where, inexplicably, people have begun to turn brown. The rest of the plot is very light (mild spoilers): Anders has a girlfriend, Oona, who must process his abrupt transformation. Anders’s father is slowly, and then quite suddenly, dying: will that be more important, in the end, than what is happening to Anders? Oona’s mother, who spends a lot of time online, on certain sites, has only ever seen the world one way; will she be able to adjust to this new reality, or fall apart? 

I was reminded immediately, on beginning this book, of A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass, where the protagonist wakes up white. Here are the first few lines from Blackass:

“Furo Wariboko awoke this morning to find that dreams can lose their way and turn up on the wrong side of sleep. He was lying nude in bed, and when he raised his head a fraction he could see his alabaster belly, and his pale legs beyond, covered with fuzz that glinted bronze in the cold daylight pouring in through the open window. He sat up with a sudden motion that swilled the panic in his stomach and spilled his hands into his lap. He stared at his hands, the pink life lines in his palms, the shellfish-coloured cuticles, the network of blue veins that ran from knuckle to wrist, more veins than he had ever noticed before. His hands were not black but white … same as his legs, his belly, all of him.”

Blackass is a great book to pair with Hamid’s: the approaches are very different, with Hamid’s being a lot more literary, and Barrett’s rather comic—but both books raise the question of race in an interesting way.

While I did not find it the most compelling book, The Last White Man is nevertheless a very quick and interesting read—I got through it in a few hours—and I recommend it.

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My rating: 7/10.