Asad Abdullahi fled his home in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1991 at the age of eight and spent his childhood and youth moving ceaselessly across the Horn of Africa and then through southern Africa before settling in the United States in 2013 as a refugee. The African leg of Asad's extraordinary life is told in Jonny Steinberg's A Man of Good Hope. In this talk, Steinberg takes up the American episode of Abdullahi's life.
Jonny Steinberg is Professor of African Studies at Oxford University. A former Rhodes Scholar and the author of seven books, he is a two-time winner of South Africa’s most prestigious literary prize, The Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, and was an inaugural winner of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Literature awarded by Yale University. A Man of Good Hope, Steinberg's most recent book, is the remarkable true story of a Somali refugee's journey across Africa and an engrossing and exquisitely written narrative that speaks to the suffering and resilience of refugees throughout the world. With his typically, though uniquely, honest and razor-sharp novelistic writing style, Steinberg peels back the layers of Asad's story, laying bare the humanity and situating Asad's story within the political and social upheavals of Steinberg's native South Africa. The book has been adapted by South Africa's Isango Ensemble into a musical playing this month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.