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Showing posts from June, 2017

Vitabu Reads: From the Land of Diamonds to the Isle of Spice

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W hen young Christopher Williams ventured out of Freetown on a merchant ship bound for Matadi in 1925, little did he know that he would leave footprints in the sand that an unborn grandson would track. Using the figurative milestones planted by Christopher almost a hundred years ago, Sigismond Henry Tucker creates an intricate picture of his family's migration story of love, endurance, and hope through the pain of separation. Sigismond's autobiography “From the Land of Diamonds to the Isle of Spice” is a complex lattice of intersecting interests. On the one hand are black Africans like Sigismond's grandfather, arriving by ship at trading ports dotted all over the continent's big coast; people native to the Congo, Malinke merchants from Senegal carrying out trade on routes throughout west and central Africa; and the bold Americans, English, and Welsh exploring opportunities in old ports of  slavery. Sigismond doesn't say what set his grandfather's trave