babah tarawally

We feel connected to distant friends, good neighbours and sometimes even complete strangers. According to the African philosophy of Ubuntu, we exist because of one another. This is not a theory or an abstract idea, but a profound wisdom that whispers: I am because we are. Writer Babah Tarawally explores this way of looking at life and places it alongside Western thought, where individualism often takes centre stage. What if a sense of community is not something you have, but something you become?

Babah Tarawally is a writer, journalist and columnist for the Dutch newspaper Trouw. He fled Sierra Leone in the 1990s and went through a seven-year asylum procedure in the Netherlands. During this period, he wrote De god met de blauwe ogen (The God with Blue Eyes). This was followed by books including Gevangen in zwart-wit denken (Trapped in Black-and-White Thinking) and De getemde man. De geschiedenis van een Afrikaanse man (The Tamed Man: The History of an African Man), in which he brings African and Western ideas about masculinity into conversation with one another. Ik ben geen mango, ik ben een mens (I Am Not a Mango, I Am a Human Being) is his latest book.