Burma Boy

"Burma Boy made me laugh a lot. I really enjoyed the book because it felt lighthearted. The character was so funny—I loved that the language was so specific to him. And it didn’t try and make it easy for you. It took me a while, as I was reading, before I was like, ‘Oh, that’s what he saying! He’s been saying ‘general’’. These wonderful little surprises like that, it’s like a little puzzle to work on with the language while you’re reading the story. I like the quirky, funny characters. It’s a very serious setting, but I can imagine that dark humor being very real—because I see it every day here in Zimbabwe. Our circumstances can be so dire, but people are still always finding something humorous in the situation. I love that. He’s a young boy who lies about his age and gets recruited into the African contingent of the army that was being sent to fight for Britain. So he goes to Burma with all the other soldiers. It’s about his experiences in the war, in the barracks in Burma, and his comrades and people from different parts of Nigeria that he meets while he’s there. Why I picked this book is because I never knew this about World War Two. We studied Hitler and Mussolini and the Allied forces. I knew that history inside out, and this was just not there: it was never part of the history that I learned. It suddenly made me realize that we’re completely missing from the history that we’re taught. We study what is called ‘contemporary world history’ but this is a story I had to discover. And why did I discover it? Because an African wrote it. That made me realize that we’re not there if we’re not writing our own stories. It’s the first time I realized the importance of that. It made me look around and see people very differently because I realized that we think of our stories as anecdotes, folktales, urban legends, things that we just talk about amongst ourselves. Other people do know about it, and some people will write about it—usually academics—but it’s not out there in the mainstream. That’s what this book opened my eyes up to and made it, for me, a very important book. It’s a very accessible read. It’s not huge. It’s not laden down by a lot of history. It’s a story about people. Yes. I then learned that one of our farmworkers fought in World War II, in one of the African regiments. He was very old, 90 something. I didn’t know that growing up, or early enough to sit down and try and find out his story."