The Nature of Shadows: An African Memoir

Every so often, a memoir comes along with the power to transcend the events in an individual's life and unite people in a collective movement of inspiration and understanding. The Nature of Shadows is such a memoir.

At the risk of painting myself too starkly into the image of Little Black Sambo or Mowgli from The Jungle Book, I was both boys: simple, dark-skinned, born in a hut in the middle of nowhere Africa. A statistic by Western sensibilities, a blip of a headline on the evening news re...