Author William Boyd explains how Nigerian Civil War experience shaped his work

Independent

02-03-2025

Author William Boyd has recalled how his work was shaped by an experience during the Nigerian Civil War involving 'six or seven drunk soldiers with their AK-47s'.
The writer, known for novels including A Good Man In Africa, was born in Ghana in 1952 and moved to Nigeria with his family in 1964, three years before the Biafran War began.
'You couldn't escape the war,' he told BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs.
He continued: 'One great event, which really did shape and change my thinking was, I was learning to drive, and we used to drive on deserted roads at the edge of the campus, with my father teaching.
'And we were driving home, he took a shortcut, and we passed a road block, a very flimsy road block, and my father spotted it, screeched to a halt, but out of the bushes came six or seven drunk soldiers with their AK-47s shouting and screaming at us because they thought we were trying to avoid the roadblock.
'They ordered us out of the car, guns pointing at us. And that moment, I thought, this could all go horribly wrong, because they were out of control, there was no officer.
'We were alone on a road in the bush. My father, to his great credit, said, 'Call that a roadblock, you useless bunch of soldiers'.
'And he upgraded them, and they started to laugh, and the whole thing was diffused, but I've never forgotten that moment of knife edge, 'uh oh. This could all end very, very badly.'
'It's affected my work, and it's affected the way I look at conflict and the way I understand wars.
'Because, even though I was never in any great danger, I did live in a country that was tearing itself apart in a civil war, and saw and had friends in the African army and heard their stories. I realised that real war is nothing like the movies.'
He continued: 'I think things that happened to me, like that moment of the roadblock in Nigeria, or my father's early death, and my wife's mother's early death… showed me that the universe is a kind of random, unsparing place.
'So I came up with this idea that everybody has their share of good luck and their share of bad luck, and with most people that the two piles that accrue in their life sort of match up, but don't expect the road to be straight and narrow.'
His first novel, A Good Man In Africa, won him the first novel gong at the Whitbread Literary Awards, now the Costa Book Awards, in 1981.
It was turned into a 1994 film starring Sean Connery and John Lithgow.
His other novels include Love Is Blind, Restless, which was adapted for TV, and Waiting For Sunrise.
Following in the footsteps of authors including Sir Kingsley Amis and Sebastian Faulks, he also wrote Solo, a James Bond continuation novel released in 2013.