In 1983, Lawder (The Wild Bird and Other Poems) volunteered for the Peace Corps at the age of 66 and was assigned to teach English in Bamako, the capital of Mali. This arresting memoir of the new life he experienced in West Africa more than makes up for the occasional passages of stilted prose. Lawder's involvement in the lives of the often impoverished people he met was heartfelt, and the Malians reciprocated by accepting him into their society. On a "name day" he was inducted into the Keita clan, one of whose leading ancestors was Namory of the subtitle. During his first three-year tenure, Lawder formed close ties with an extended Muslim family he met through a woman who cooked for him. He provides vivid portraits of the students he taught in debate and African American literature classes and describes his love affair with a young Malian woman that almost resulted in marriage. After two years in the U.S. Lawder returned to Bamako permanently, where, at the age of 78, he now lives with his adopted family of six African children, two of whom he rescued from the traditional custom of female genital excision. Photos.
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Product Description
What distinguishes this remarkable narrative from other accounts of personal growth is not just its vivid and intimate picture of West African life, but the fact that its author embarked on his adventure at an age when most men and women are resigned to life in a rocking chair. At age sixty-six, after the break-up of a stormy marriage, Donald Lawder begins a new life as a volunteer teacher for the Peace Corps in the impoverished country of Mali, in West Africa. He is adopted by a Moslem family, given a Malian name, and learns to pray in the village mosque. As "Professor of English" at the state teacher's college in Mali's capital city of Bamako, he teaches Debate, Black American History, and the philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau to French-speaking African students and becomes deeply involved with a Moslem student less than one third his age. Later, after a two-year job hunt in the U.S. convinces him that America is no country for old men, he returns to Bamako for good, as chief of an African family of six children ranging in age from three to twenty-three years. He arrives in time to witness his unarmed students' heroic overthrow of the brutal dictator Moussa Traore and their confused efforts to establish one of the first democracies in West Africa. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
