“Black Mamba Boy” by Nadifa Mohammed
It’s important to give tribute to upcoming Somali artists. I hope you all go out and buy this book.
This is a review from the Independent:
In this debut novel, Nadifa Mohamed takes as her source material her father’s childhood journey across Africa, which begins in the Yemeni port city of Aden where ten-year-old Jama loses his mother, his only emotional mooring in the world, and embarks on a great Odyssean voyage northwards, to find his absent father.
Mohamed, who is herself a child of Africa’s fractured history – she lived in Hargeisa, Somalia, until war drove her family to London – says that she felt compelled to record her father’s survival spirit in fictive form, and partly composed the book from taped interviews with him.
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