The seven stories of this collection are all set during the early nineteen-sixties, a dynamic age of transition from colonial rule to independence. They show the complex lives of a diverse population: a villager fallen on hard times who laments the means by which he feeds his family; an expatriate couple confronting a headless staircase and their own existential crises; a leper who survives another day of beggary; a British colonial officer and a traditional chief both of whom fear a diminished status as they confront a dramatic change in their chiefdom; and of course the beautiful young Sierra Leonean who alarms her community by her drastic action.
This evocative study of a water Goddess among the Igbo of Lake Oguta in southeastern Nigeria, thoroughly explores the rituals, beliefs and social organization associated with rituals of women's power. A form of Mammy Wata found through coastal Western Africa...
These pages give us her searing prayer for the dead of 9/11, her Nobel lecture on the power of language, her searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., her heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. She looks deeply into the fault...
After enjoying years as a popular journalist and poet, intellectual and freethinker Gerald Massey turned his vast studies in the field of Egyptology into A Book of the Beginnings, a bold statement that the origin of all civilization lays in...