Classical Music

Last edited Sat Sep 14, 2024, 07:01 AM - Edit history (1)

her on Amazon: Taking Flight.

This is gut wrenching! Sympathy to her family and friends. Whatever she was put on this earth to do, she did it and more in her short life.


Edited to add this Amazon book excerpt:

In Africa my papa loved the dusty, dry winds of the Harmattan, which blew down from the Sahara Desert every December or January. “Ah, the Harmattan has brought us good fortune again!” he would exclaim when he returned from harvesting rice. I would smile when he said that because I knew that his next words would be “But not as good a fortune as the year when it brought us Mabinty . . . no, never as good as that!”

My parents said that I was born with a sharp cry and a personality as prickly as an African hedgehog. Even worse, I was a girl child--and a spotted one at that, because I was born with a skin condition called vitiligo, which caused me to look like a baby leopard. Nevertheless, my parents celebrated my arrival with joy.

When my father proclaimed that my birth was the high point of his life, his older brother, Abdullah, shook his head and declared, “It is an unfortunate Harmattan that brings a girl child . . . a worthless, spotted girl child, one who will not even bring you a good bride-price.” My mother told me that my father laughed at his brother. He and Uncle Abdullah did not see eye to eye on almost anything.

My uncle was right in one respect: in a typical household in the Kenema District of southeastern Sierra Leone, West Africa, my birth would not have been cause for celebration. But our household was not typical. First of all, my parents’ marriage had not been arranged. They had married for love, and my father refused to take a second wife, even after several years of marriage, when it appeared that I would be their only child. Secondly, both of my parents could read, and my father believed that his daughter should learn to read as well.