Inua Ellams / Writer / Curator / Part-time Hero

Welcome to October / My Birthday Month x

We are already halfway through it so the greeting is very, but I hope you accept it with grace. After all, it’s my birthday on the 23rd.

Anyway, remember the formula? 4 news items & something to watch…

1 / Search Party / Oct 21 & 22

I lived in Brixton for 4 incredible years; years in which I learnt so much about myself, my community, Black Britain, Britishness, and belonging. I did a lot of work for Oval House before it migrated up the road and evolved into Brixton House (the newest theatre in South London), so I’m ecstatic this is happening; Two days before my birthday, I'mma be on stage letting YOU GUYS direct me on what to read TO YOUY. This audience-led controlled-explosion-of-a show plays in London’s Brixton House for two nights (before my birthday). Bring a friend,  loved one, enemy, frenemy, family, work wife or husband, department, team, entire office, UK branch or just you.

Tix / here

21st & 22 / October
£8 / 7:30pm
Brixton House
385 Coldharbour Lane
Brixton, London
SW9 8GL

Search Party is part of an entire festival of work called Uprising marking the 40th anniversary of the Brixton Uprising. I really suggest you check out some of the other events.

x

2 / Stained Metal / poems / plaque

As part of the MBE / Stained Metal project / I travelled to Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria, to research, write and complete a sequence of 10 poems that will form a major section in my next book of poems. 

It was an utterly humbling and incredible experience. I can’t wait to show you the photos and the poems when I am good and able to do so. And honestly, it is odd that both of us are ‘working’ in this picture. The brother behind is literally bending metal, back-breaking work, and I’m… sitting writing rhymes. So, I got up and actually did some of their work… sorting through bits of scrap metal, tipping them into an iron pot, dropping it down into the furnace and evenly chipping away the moulds to reveal the sculpture beneath…

Stay tuned… all will be revealed.

But, if you come to Search Party and shout out the word ‘Bronze’ I’ll have to read you one of the new poems…

x

3 / Together For Palestine / 17 September 

The Together For Palestine concert at Wembley Arena last month was incredible. The huge auditorium was filled with love, solidarity, understanding and compassion, and when we agreed to take part in the event months earlier, we could not have imagined that: 1/ A day before, the United Nations would finally acknowledged that there was indeed a genocide happening in Gaza. 2/ In less than a month, there would be a ceasefire 3/ Hostages would have been released from Israel and Gaza, and 4/ The United Kingdom would finally recognise Palestine.

Together for Palestine received praise around the world; from UK outlets such as The Times,  the Guardian, BBC, the Evening Standard, British Vogue, Novara Media, NME, GQ and The Independent, through to global outlets such as MSNBC, Al Jazeera, The New Arab, Billboard, Middle East Eye, Dazed Middle East, Vogue Arabia, Time of India, The National and much more. The London Standard called the event “provided a vital beacon of hope” and more than £1.6 million has been raised so far and social media clips from the night have already been viewed by tens of millions around the globe.

This was my small contribution to the night. I performed a very small play, with Riz Ahmed, Guy Pearce, Amer Hlehel, El Far3i and Motaz Malhess. We played men from Palestine talking about their last days and hours on earth before they become martyrs.

I hope the ceasefire holds, so that good faith and honest conversations about how to achieve a free Palestine can begin.

x

4 / Barber Shop / 15 October 

Barber Shop Chronicles in Belgium was an absolute triumph. All the shows were sold out and ended with standing ovations for the cast and crew. I am currently sat in a hotel in Paris, hours from the Paris premiere of the play. So, remember, the play transitioned from:

London, England - Brussels, Belgium
Leeds, England - Liege, Belgium
Lagos, Nigeria - Senegal, Dakar
Accra, Ghana - Ivory Coast, Abidjan
Kampala, Uganda - Cameroon, Doula
Harare, Zimbabwe - Burkina Faso, Wagadougou
Joburg, South Africa - Congo, Kinshasa
Kingston, Jamaica - Port-a-Prince, Haiti

Well, we consider modifying it to centre Paris instead of Brussels, then at the last minute, decided not to, just to piss off the snobbish Parisians a bit. If you are here, I hope you can grab a ticket:

15-19 Oct
La MC93 Maison de la Culture
de Seine-Saint-Denis à Bobigny
est subventionnée par
Tix / €9-€30

Book / here.

x

5 / And I’m still reeling from the news of D’Angelo’s passing. And I’m still trying to find the words to articulate what he means to me. And I’m still afraid to listen to any of his music. And I still have them downloaded to my phone - like I have done for the last 11 years of my life. And I am morning a titan and genius and an angel of man.

For this month, I’d like you to listen to one of my favourite songs of his / here.

x

Thanks for reading. See you soon.
As always, any questions, holleratchaboy.

#TenThingsLearnt w/c Sept 22 🧵

1. Over 50% of textile produced in the world is polyester.

2. Polyester was invented in Britain in the 1940s.

3. Polyester is derived from Petroleum, and like most plastic, it is not biodegradable.

4. Between 700 and 4,000 microplastic fibres are released per gram in a single wash.

5. Isreal bombed 5 Arab countries in 8 days.

6. Gen Z protesters in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal have led intense protests against governments.

7. Small boat crossings account for roughly 4% of total immigration to the UK. Only 4%.

8. Antares is the brightest star in the Scorpius constellation.

9. Cashmere comes from goats and Wool comes from sheep.

10. Some mushrooms emit their own light.

#TenThingsLearnt w/c August 18🧵

1. The price of Gold has doubled since 2022, driven up by geopolitical uncertainty, inflation concerns and Trump’s tariffs.

2. Cambodia's Khmer language has 74 letters, making it the world's largest alphabet, but only 68 of those letters are used in modern Khmer.

3. This year, wildfires in Spain burned almost three times more land than the seasonal average.

4. New Zealand has decided to cut Māori words from a selection of books used to teach five-year-olds, and decided not to reprint a well-loved book for young readers because it contained too many Māori words.

5. The BBC describes Hamas as 'recognised as a terrorist organisation by the UK and other countries' every time it reports on Gaza. But of the 195 countries in the world, 186 recognise Hamas as a resistance movement and / or ONLY its military wing as terrorists.

6. Ifa and Shintoism are similar in the belief that a soul or spirit can dwell in everything, animate or inanimate.

7. In the United States, the top 10% earn 47% of all income. But South Africa takes the inequality crown — their top 10% captures 65% of income.

8. Immigration into the UK costs the treasury £5.4bn a year. Tax evasion costs the treasury up to £46bn a year.

9. The tax avoiding billionaires own large sections of the press that drive anti-immigrant narratives.

10. Finland began using the swastika as its airforce symbol in 1918, years before the rise of the Nazis, and have recently decided to from it from their flags because it causes “awkward situations with foreign visitors”.

#TenThingsLearnt w/c Aug 4 🧵

1. India has doubled its number of airports in the last ten years. 🛫

2. The government of Thailand regularly fund families to pay for a son’s gender-transition surgeries, because ‘ladyboys’ - as they are commonly referred to - are great for tourism and the country’s gdp.

3. Killer whales go through the menopause. 😳💦

4. After stories about suicides are published or publicised in mass media, in the days and weeks after, suicide rates climb by 12%.

5. Israel is seeing a wave of soldiers taking their own lives - five died by suicide in July. Israel Defence Forces’s own investigations have found it is what soldiers have seen and done in Gaza that are the cause.

6. During the period of French colonisation, The Republic of Benin, known for its intellectuals, was nicknamed ‘The Latin quarter of Africa’.

7. The British Museum’s collection includes over 8 Million items. The vast majority of them have never ever been displayed or even catalogued. Yet, their collections grow. 🚫

8. Skunk spray is flammable: 🦨💨🔥

9. Dean Cain, who volunteered to join ICE, is one-quarter Japanese. The rest of his ancestors are Welsh, Irish, and French Canadian. He passed for White American enough to play Superman alongside Teri Hatcher’s Louis Lane. His birth name is Dean Tanaka. 🤣

10. The Chinese language has multiple words for compassion, each hi-lighting different shades of the concept, which is deeply rooted in Chinese culture, religion, and philosophy. 🙏🏿🫡

#TenThingsLearnt w/c July 28🧵

1. There are 7 vowels in the Yoruba language!

2. There is a whites-only settlement in the middle of Arknasaw.😳

3. …Black influencers are asking if they can sponsor some families to join 😂😭

4. “Crushing the flowers won’t delay the spring”.

5. 85% of England’s river-stretches are in poor ecological condition. 🏞️

6. ‘Radical’ comes from the Latin word ‘Rad’ which means ‘Rooted’.

7. Only 0.002 % of Earth’s water flows through rivers. They are relatively rare, yet, civilisations are built on river banks. 🌊

8. In the late 80s, Asian women who were coming to the UK, were subject to virginity tests - vaginal examinations - at Heathrow Airport.

9. Each year in Amsterdam, sanitation workers pull out 15,000 bikes from the canals.🚲🚳

10. Abracadabra" is actually from the aramaic (before Hebrew) phrase “Avrakehdabra" which means “I will create as I speak."🪄✨

#TenThingsLearnt w/c July 14🧵

1. Children are increasingly taking breaks from screens and smartphones to better manage their mental health, personal safety and concentration spans. 📲 The number of 12-to-15 year olds doing has risen from 18% to 40% since 2022.

2. The lettuce sea slug can steal chloroplast from the plants they eat, mount them on their backs, and essentially, like plants, live on pure sunlight! ☀️⛅️🌅

3. Bees can see ultraviolet light, and Salmons can smell the river in which they were born. 🐝🐝

4. The "Black and Tans" were a British paramilitary force recruited into the Royal Irish Constabulary during the Irish War of Independence.

5. They were notorious for their brutality and violence against the Irish civilian population and the Irish Republican Army.

6. When Ireland was liberated, they were deployed to British Mandate Palestine to subjugate Palestinians - do to them what they had done to Ireland - and protect The Jewish Population.

7. Petrichor, the smell of after-rain, means ‘the blood of the gods.’ Said to give life to inanimate object, this is what rain does; it turns sand to soil, bringing dust to life. 🌧️

8. Camels can smell water for 50 miles away. 🐪🐫

9. There are almost 150 miles of recreational sandy beaches in the country, but only five miles are accessible to ordinary Jamaicans. The rest is owned by the hotel resorts built on the beach front. 🏝️🏖️

10. The beaches are still vested - owned and controlled by the British Crown. 🤬

#TenThingsLearnt w/c July 7🧵

1. There are over 350 types of marsupials, every size from Kangaroos to Wombats.

2. 2/3 of Americans don’t know Trump’s just passed the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’.

3. The big cuts to health care and food assistance won’t come in until 2028, meaning, the people will only start suffering AFTER Trump midterm elections.

4. Thousands of Afghan families are being violently expelled from Iran.

5. Liberia produced Africa’s first female head of state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

6. Liberia's capital, Monrovia, was named in honour of America's fifth President, James Monroe.

7. ‘Noisy’ means loud. ‘Noisome’ means smelly.

8. Because so many Africans are resident in America (e.g: Elon Musk, Dania Gurira, Thuso Mbedu, Zorhan Mamdani, Trevor Noah), using the term ‘African-American’ to refer to Black American is increasingly fraught.

9. More people have died than were born in the EU every year since 2012; migration is the only reason for the EU’s population growth. They NEED immigrants or the workforce and GDP will collapse.

10. Twice as many Africans study in China as in America.

#TenThingsLearnt w/c 30 June 🧵

1. Before Auschwitz, there was Namibia - Germany’s first genocide. Germany used concentration camps, racial science, and extermination long before the Nazis.

2. Old Trafford, the home stadium of Manchester United, has a seating capacity of 74,310.

3. 40,000 people were granted asylum in the UK in 2024.

4. Iran takes in more refugees than any country on earth. 3.5million. This is the country Israel and The US bombed.

5. The British government spends ONLY 0.22% percent of its entire government budget on refugees.

6. Memories are for predicating the future NOT for knowing the past; They sharpen your reflexes and instincts for your survival.

7. More wind turbines and solar panels were installed in China last year than in the rest of the world combined.

8. 99% of Americans have forever chemicals in their blood.

9. Malaysia received over 35,000 tons of plastic waste from American scrap brokers last year, but those arrangements are ending. Malaysia banned shipments of plastic waste from the U.S., as did China, Thailand and Indonesia.

10. An experiment reveals that our vision lags up to 15 seconds behind real time.

#TenThingsLearnt w/c 2 June🧵

1. Around 57% of languages studied do not have gender-specific pronouns. I.e they cater for non-binary identities.

2. The Vandals were a migrating group of conquers who originated from Scandinavia. They ransacked Rome, and from their actions came the word ‘Vandalism’.

3. When sharks swim, because of the nature of their skin - which is made of little teeth - they can reduces drag by 10 to 12%. Engineers are tryna adapt this for the aviation industry. Planes will burn less fuel and reduce pollution.🦈✈️

4. The moment you put your key in your door and suddenly have to pee is so prevalent, it known as ‘The Latchkey Phenomenon’. Your brain knows you can find relief quickly, and stops suppressing your bladder. 💦😣

5. Gaza has the highest percentage of child amputees in the world.

6. The Gervais principle, articulated by Venkatesh Rao (based on a in-depth but light-hearted analysis of The Office) is a theory that ‘sociopaths’ who know how to acquire and manipulate power rule all organisations. Beneath them are the loyal ‘clueless’ and disaffected ‘losers.’

7. 20 years ago, adults could focus on a screen without interruption for an average of 2 and a half minutes. In 2012, it was 75 seconds. In 2021, it shrank to an average of 47 seconds.

8. China is soon to have a zero-tariff policy for exports from 53 African countries.

9. Trump included Congo-Brazzaville in his travel ban. He meant to include the Democratic Republic of Congo. 😂🤡

10. Annoyance is the price of community.

#TenThingsLearnt w/c May 26 🧵

1. When trans woman protest bare-chested, and are arrested for “indecent exposure”, police HAVE to book them as WOMEN because bare-chested men are never arrested for indecent exposure. It’s ingenious, using the law against itself.

2. Nigeria has 370 ethnic groups and over 520 languages and dialects, but Sudan has 600 ethnic groups, and over 150 languages. Sudan is the oldest human migration corridor in the world.

3. Nintendo is older than the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

4. OnlyFans is a British company. They pay more UK tax (£149M in 2023) than the entire UK fishing industry (about £67M).

5. The UK’s entire energy consumption is 80 Gigawatts.

6. China adds 300 Gigawatts of clean energy to their existing grids PER YEAR. China has the capacity to raise 1000 per year - only from solar power.

7. The TOTAL electricity capacity in AFRICA is 250-300 Gigawatts.

8. The EU is Israel’s biggest trade partner, purchasing one third of all its exports.

9. Staff at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) were instructed to shred and burn their own archives; classified documents and personnel files.

10. Because metal expands, in summer, the Eiffel Tower grows taller.

#TenThingsLearnt w/c May 12🧵

1. Only 512 Teslas were bought in the UK in April. 😅🥲✊🏿

2. Indigenous Americans invented lacrosse. They have been playing for 1,000 years.😧

3. Whereas English has many words to describe the passage of time, the Hopi language only has “sooner” and “later”. 🕰️☺️

4. There are at least 3 types of volcanoes: composite, shield & cinder cone. 🌋

5. In 2025, UK wildfires have already burned more intensely than any other year on record, and it’s only may.🔥🚒

6. Only 30% of the electorate voted in Nigeria’s 2023 elections. 🤦🏿‍♂️🤷🏿‍♂️

7. The average white South African is 20 times wealthier than the average black South African. 🇿🇦😕

8. 81% of Mauritians regularly go online, more than 4 x the share of Ugandans (17%), Malawians (19%), Nigeriens (19%), and Tanzanians (20%). 😳

9. Strawberries become sweeter when the days are bright and the nights are cool; the plants rest overnight and use more of the excess energy gained during the day to produce more natural sugars.🍓🍓😋

10. Men are generally harder to lip-read because we mumble too much and between 30 and 40 % of speech is actually visible on your lips – everything else is complicated guesswork. 🤔

#TenThingsLearnt w/c June 5🧵

1. Only female mosquitoes drink blood. Male mosquitoes primarily feed on nectar and plant juices for energy.

2. Female mosquitoes need a blood meal to produce eggs, and they also play a role in the transmission of disease.

3. Collagen smells like burning flesh.

4. Camels were once indigenous to North America. There were 20 different variations, from rabbit size to typical camel sizes, and beyond.

5. The camping to segregate toilets for trans people is really an attempt to exclude them from public life. It’s the new Jim Crow.

6. Doctor Who fans are the best fans in the world… 🙏🏿❤️🥲🎉

7. …1.59 million people watched my episode on May 10th! 😳😨🥲😌

8. The figure is not consolidated and does not include BBC iPlayer, where it was available at 8am on Saturday, ahead of its BBC One broadcast.

9. The United Arab Emirates is angling to become the AI capital of Earth by bankrolling America’s entire AI infrastructure; the sheikh in charge controls a $1.5 Trillion fortune.

10. Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAi once said: “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there’ll be great companies.”