AWOONOR'S "COMES THE VOYAGER AT LAST"

The author, Kofi Awoonor, educated in Ghana, London, and New York, is a well known long-established African writer. This, his second novel, is an interesting travel narrative that combines African and African American history (the forced removal of West Africans to the New World) with myth. The story unfolds in the mind of its central character, an African American who can trace his ancestry to slavery and the Civil War, as he returns to West Africa for a spiritual reunion with the people. This main narrative is juxtaposed with an italicized account of West Africans being led to a slave ship more than 300 years earlier. This book reads as one Ghanaian's version of Alex Haley's African American family saga Roots…