A wonderfully intimate look at the convulsive changes, and deep scarring, in post-colonial Africa.
From the vice president of Ghana, a series of sensitive, honest autobiographical essays on the “lost decades” in his homeland.
Mahama employs the moving devices of fiction to convey these coming-of-age remembrances of how Ghana moved from dictatorship to thriving democracy during the last few decades. The author was 7 years old, attending an elite boarding school in Accra, when the 1966 coup d’etat of Ghana’s first president after liberation from British colonialism, Kwame Nkrumah, occurred, and no one came to pick Mahama up from school. He had been living with his father since he was three, separated from his mother, who stayed in northern Ghana; his various siblings, 19 in all, by multiple marriages, were scattered throughout the country. The coup altered their lives irreversibly. In “Sankofa," meaning to “go back and get it,” Mahama writes of the desire among the African diaspora to return to their homelands and reclaim their African names (once changed to Christian names), languages and heritages. A gifted student, Mahama stayed in school in Accra, his small world representing in microcosm what occurred on the larger African continent. The newly arrived “bush” boy at the school extorted snacks from the boys until young Mahama bravely resolved to defy him, while the others crumbled in fear. “Why hadn’t I seen before that our strength, our key to victory, was in our numbers, our unity?” he writes. In other essays, the author examines his study of history, love of socialist ideology, endurance of another coup in 1981 and exile to Nigeria, and his travel to the Soviet Union.
A wonderfully intimate look at the convulsive changes, and deep scarring, in post-colonial Africa.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60819-859-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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SEEN & HEARD
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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