Java Hill: An African Journey : a Nation's Evolution Through Ten Generations of a Family Linking Four Continents

"The personal is political". So went a popular saying in the heady 60s. In presenting the story of the Ulzens and Elmina as a metaphor for the African condition in history, this novel is an eloquent corroboration of this idea. I applaud the brutal honesty, not unmixed with touching empathy, with which the author narrates the details of political events and family dramas: characters, personalities, roles and relations marked by conscious and unwitting paradoxes, complicities, mixed motives behind noble stances and deeds. In a word, IRONY is the dominant prism through which the events are rendered.

Ato Sekyi Otu
Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Thought
York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada