Conversations with the most distinguished black thinkers of our times,
including Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, Wole Soyinka and Michelle
Obama, on race, decolonisation, systemic inequalities, and the climate
crisis.
WITH A FOREWORD FROM BERNARDINE EVARISTO
In a series of incisive and intimate encounters Sarah Ladipo Manyika
introduces some of the most distinguished Black thinkers of our times,
including Nobel Laureates Toni Morrison and Wole Soyinka, and civic
leaders first lady Michelle Obama and Senator Cory Booker.
She searches for truth with poet Claudia Rankine and historian Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. She discusses race and gender with South African
filmmaker Xoliswa Sithole and American actor and playwright Anna Deavere
Smith. She interrogates the world around us with pioneering publisher
Margaret Busby, parliamentarian Lord Michael Hastings and civil rights
activist Pastor Evan Mawarire - who dared to take on President Robert
Mugabe and has lived to tell the tale. We also meet the living
embodiment of the many threads, ideas and histories in this book through
the profile of her fabulous 102-year-old friend, Mrs Willard Harris.
In journeys that book-end the collection, Sarah Ladipo Manyika reflects
on her own experience of being seen as 'oyinbo' in Nigeria, African in
England, Arab in France, coloured in Southern Africa and Black in
America, while feeling the least Black and most human among her fellow
travellers, explorers all, against the sharp white relief of the South
Pole.
