Customer Reviews

Oba's Story: Rastafari, Purification, and Power

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The interweaving of the personal, the political and the religious growth of one man - Oba - from the island of St. Vincent in the West Indies greatly informs one's understanding of a part of the world generally ignored in American history. Though Americans frequently vacation in the Islands, and though West Indians have long populated the United States, the history, culture and daily lives of the people in that part of the world are basically unknown to most Americans. That will no longer be true after reading this book.

So compellingly capsulated is the history that I found it at times even more engrossing than Oba's personal trajectory. Written in a prose style that is both intelligent and accessible, this book leaves you with the feeling of wanting more and wanting to learn more.

Even before I began reading, I knew this book was something special. The prose is presaged by the product: a well crafted paperback edition that uses good quality paper, an easy to read font and size, and enough space between the lines to make it comfortable.

The introduction, which introduces the story and the rationale without any extra verbiage, tells you that this author, George D. Colman (who happens to be a friend and neighbor in Oaxaca) has the kind of spare writing style that gets the job done without falling in love with himself.

The story is a complex but compassable tale of the parallel development of one man, one family, and two renaissances, one religious and the other political. It takes place against the background of the waxing of Rastafarianism and the waning of British colonial rule in the eastern Caribbean, and recounts some of the ways that the one influenced the other.

It is not a stale tale for academics, however. For from it. Colman is as interested in the players as the game; in the complex realities of current affairs in the region; in the forces that shaped a young tear-about from St. Vincent into the man who marched onto a cricket field during a welcoming ceremony for an African prince in the Vincentian capital, dressed in the colors and waving the flag of Africa.

Africa World Press put out a fine book, equal to (and, I feel sure, reflecting their pleasure with) the fine work it contains. Congratulations all `round.

Stan Gotlieb
"Oaxaca, Mexico: an Expatriate Life"
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