Description
Book SynopsisHaunted by memories of a Tanzanian childhood abruptly ended when her parents were deported, Jane Bryce returns in search of the past only to be ambushed by the present. As she retraces her own and her parents’ footsteps she is surprised by unexpected connections, reaching back into the colonial past, and further, to a time of myth and legend. The key to understanding what holds these together comes to her in the form of ‘zamani’—the Swahili sea of time where spirits inhabit places and landscape, memory animates the everyday and voices from the past speak to the present. Collectively these voices paint a picture of social and political change in Tanzania over the last 50 years, and invite the author to take her place in it.
Trade ReviewSpare and rather remarkable. Unsentimental and stern and filled with honoured things. — Peter Merrington, South African scholar, artist and poet, author of Zebra Crossings: Tales from the Shaman’s Record; There are different kinds of belonging. There’s the kind that comes with a passport, and there’s a kind of helpless, spiritual attachment. Jane Bryce, revisiting the places where she spent her Tanzanian childhood, finds them haunted by the ghosts of a colonial past. In this painfully honest and insightful memoir she explores the themes of identity and belonging and how these can survive a lifetime apart. — Sally Keeble, British political activist, author of She, You, I
