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| Photo by Steve Gregson |
Amets Arzallus Antia met Ibrahima while helping him apply for asylum in the Basque Country. Moved by his story, Amets began recording their conversations, assembling a dossier to support his application. That’s how the book was born. Himself the son of migrants, Amets was struck by the fact that Ibrahima’s journey to Europe was never meant to be a migration: it was a search for his brother, who had left before him and gone missing. Ibrahima never wanted to leave Guinea, as his destiny was there. But love forced his feet forward.
He crossed the entire African continent, more than once - mostly on foot, sometimes by motorbike, rarely in the back of a pickup. Sometimes with friends made along the way, but often alone, walking with only his demons. He survived deserts, prisons, and refugee camps. He escaped, was caught again, rescued, beaten, and then sold. He crossed Mali, Algeria, Morocco, and Libya – a land, his words, “not made for the living.” And once across the sea, another odyssey began: the one of papers, of bureaucracy, of waiting and hoping and more waiting.
Little Brother is profoundly unsettling. Vast yet intimate, horrifying in its grace and delicate in its brutality. It gives voice and flesh to the thousands we read about only as numbers, as statistics. It reverses the depersonalisation we use to cope with this relentless tragedy.
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| Photo by Steve Gregson |
Blair Gyabaah becomes a vessel for Ibrahima’s story. In his eyes flicker the weight of responsibility. It’s a monumental role, and he handles it with gentleness and power. From the joyful chaos of childhood in Guinea to the silent devastation of loss, and the stripped-down telling of trauma. Gyabaah’s and Ibrahima’s raw and expansive emotions hit me like waves.
The ensemble (Youness Bouzinab, Whitney Kehinde, Ivan Oyik, Mo Sesay) shifts fluidly between roles: family, friends, smugglers, strangers. They weave in and out like memories: some recurring, others ghosts. Every figure who appears feels like a whole life we only glimpse, a passer-by with their own story, with a past and, hopefully, a better future.
Stella Powell-Jones’s direction is almost invisible: delicate, respectful, never invasive. She trusts the story to carry itself, and it does.
I was in awe of Jahmiko Marshall’s lighting design: soft but punchy, evocative and dreamlike. It painted skins and backdrops in tones ofsand, sea, and wind. Of deserts crossed and storms weathered.
Timberlake Wertenbaker, who first translated the book, adapts it for the stage with clarity and care. The language is spare and potent, in keeping with the Bertsolaritza tradition of Basque oral poetry and the Guinean custom of storytelling: gathering, listening, passing truths hand to hand. It evokes the spirit of ancient epics. Ibrahima becomes a modern Odysseus, not one seeking wisdom, but one changed irrevocably by the journey.
Little Brother may not be intended as a bleak rendering of humanity, but I can’t help but envy those who still hold hope close to their hearts. It stuns me that we discuss and acknowledge the legacy of colonisation and imperialism in Africa, while simultaneously ignoring their consequences in present-day migration policies. These stories are real. Yet politicians instrumentalise suffering in election campaigns, using lives as pawns, scapegoating the vulnerable to distract the masses.
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| Photo by Steve Gregson |
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