Vitabu Books

Email turned 40 this June. Like most electronic tools these days one wonders how the world ever did without it. Billions of stories have been shared by email since 1971 and over a period of three to four months one more digital story was added to the ever-growing number. My emails with Brian Rath , a South African writer, would fill up a huge folder. This week, Vitabu Books brings you the most recent exchanges. Tell me brother, have you heard from Johannesburg? Vitabu Books : What are you working on? Brian Rath : I'm working on the memoirs of a misspent youth. I've done some crazy, dangerous and really stupid things in my time. I think it's worth writing about. Rian Malan before me, and Mark Gevisser recently, have had some success with personal stories and some agents are actively seeking South African memoirs. So I might as well cash in. But seriously, I've had about five different incarnations in one lifetime so far (and another one beckons) so there's n

Shika E. Ademu-John's LinkedIn summary describes him as a professional with over 20 years of public relations, sales and marketing experience; a team player with skills focused on contributing solutions for healthcare. Shika is also a blogger. In the "About me" section of his old blog , he writes of his passion for African food. Shika is onetime owner-manager of the Awujoh Restaurant which he opened sometime in 2003. Awujoh enjoyed rave reviews from papers such as The Home News Tribune , The Star Ledger , and The Courier News in 2006 with a Zagat rating in 2007. Now, he's sharing his secrets in a cookbook entitled My Wife's Hands that will be available on his website sometime this summer. Shika describes the book simply as an "anthology of African recipes that document the attributes of African cuisine." Vitabu Books caught up with him on Facebook where he serves up scrumptious dishes like the smoked pepper chicken in the photo. The caption reads:

It's the Bayou Bowl tomorrow, Saturday, June 11. Prior commitments meant I couldn't watch the 2011 All Star high school football game between the best graduated players in Louisiana and Texas. But I'll definitely be rooting for a friend's son. He's one of the players in Louisiana's dream team, and he's going to Louisiana State University (LSU) this fall. He hopes to play in the first game of the season as part of the LSU Tigers football team. When I found out my friend's son, we'll call him Al, was headed to LSU earlier in the year, I asked him whether he knew “Mike the Tiger,” the mascot that represents LSU on the football field, had a budget bigger than Sierra Leone's? He chuckled and asked wryly, "Who knew? I didn't either, I confessed. It wasn't till I read Mohamed Gbow Sheriff’s Bayou Days and encountered LSU campus life through the eyes and ears of the book's protagonist, Ahmad. Ahmad had left Sierra Leone sometime