Gus Michael Nwanokwu

Black Shamrocks Gus Michael Nwanokwu

While many academics and social scientists have examined the psychological and societal implications of growing up as a mixed-race person, few works exist that chronicle the actual lived experience of navigating life while juggling two cultures and racial identities.

Gus Nwanokwu seeks to fill this literary void with Black Shamrocks, a powerful memoir of life as a half-Nigerian and half-Irish boy in London and the in the 1960s and 70s.

The son of a Biafran-Nigerian father and an Irish mother, Nwanokwu experiences from a tender age the harsh realities of racism, classism, and anti-immigration sentiments and bigotry in post-colonial England.

Despite the high hurdles and the abject poverty into which he and his siblings were born, Nwanokwu rises above the challenges, pursues an education, and spends his life giving back as a teacher and contributing to the betterment of society.

With keen insights about the nature of the challenges he faced, Nwanokwu's coming-of-age memoir deftly explores his attempts to balance black and white, poverty and pride, love and violence, irreverence and respect, joy and pain, justice and injustice, and misery and satisfaction against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world.