In the books I read sometimes I need to stop and ask Barby, “Can I read this aloud to you?”

Like when Sanneh speaks of an African childhood:

An African child hood such as mine was not littered with the kind of stimuli we associate with age-specific gadgets, including toys of every description and sophistication. An African child learns pretty quickly that playmates are not the same as playthings, and having friends is altogether different from possessing things. A childhood landscape in Africa is a pretty stripped-down scene, with not even the barest of things made for children. But what a child lacks in mechanical toys is more than made up for in the organic richness of human contact and relationship. Society was designed that way.


What to a Western eye looks like childhood of deprivation, then, is to the African a stage of life brimming with assets of childhood enrichment. The African child lives in a close, crowded world, a world teeming with faces and sounds and movements that the child learns to decipher eventually in to recognition and affirmation, each smiling face a lighted clue in the growing shape of knowing and belonging. In the workaday world a mother carries her infant on her back, tied with a strip of cloth. She talks to the infant, rocking and humming to reassure it, pointing out things, singing lullabies, and in general letting the infant in on greetings and exchanges with friends and passers-by. The education of the child begins on the mother’s back, with the mother’s daily chores and physical exertions the setting of real life experience. The child is nurtured with the mother’s milk and trained on the mother’s back, always within reach, never forgotten or out of mind, and everywhere attended and surround by people. It provides a strong sense of company and society, reinforced with the steady hand of familiarity, support, and encouragement. Isolation and loneliness are considered extreme forms of child abuse, a form of social strangling. Women in the Gambia would weep if they saw a child alone, even if not their own (25-26).

Or, like when he narrates the way he succumbs, finally, to God drawing him to himself:

In my fumbling steps I came to realize that there was a sure road to fellowship with God and I should take it without hesitation and without deviation. I could postpone the decision no longer. I used to go to bed thinking that the issue would go away by daybreak, but it didn’t. By morning it simply revived in intensity. When night came around, the clamor would subside, only for the day, once more to rekindle it, with night and day in their alternation as two contestants pitted in a tug-of-war.


Then as if prompted, on a solitary walk on the ocean beach one April afternoon I could not silence the voice begging for a yea or nay – begging, indeed, for night or day to decide the issue once and for all. But the morning light was already shining through … It was as if I heard a solicitous whisper, a simple, clear call borne on the wings of infinite forbearance to answer the summons of life: “Do not be afraid. Jesus surrendered to God. Won’t you?”


… Suddenly I felt unable to continue with my stroll unless I persisted in defying the relentless nipping at my heels. A momentary pause was enough to set the new course. I had no idea what I was doing or why. The short, small step I took to suspend my seaside stroll and head home turned me in a new direction: I had to follow Jesus as the crucified and risen One. Like a gentle nod, a wave of anticipation rose in me as I responded feebly to a long delayed invitation, like rejoining a journey begun before my mother conceived me.


When I turned to go home I realized I had also yielded to the mystery pursuing me. I remember the sense of a door opening and a reassuring presence sweeping into my life. With my guard down, I had the feeling of giving myself in trust. By the time I reached home my legs were heavy, and the next thing I knew I was tumbling to my knees in prayer to Jesus, pleading, imploring, begging for God to forgive me, to accept me, to teach me, to help me – everything a child looks for. The cross flashed in my mind, making me think of redemptive solicitude. I was in tears, but not for long. 


… I got up from my knees with the feeling that I was waking up on a new day. The late afternoon was infused with a grace-tinged soothing flare, and with the hint of the luminous freshness of new creation. Awakened, all sense of struggle, fear, and anxiety vanished. I felt bound and confused no longer. It was a new feeling of release and of freedom, infused with a sense of utter, serene peace. I could speak about it only in terms of new life, of being born again (101-102).