Showing results for "odyssey" in Africa

Question: What do you do when the kitchen wall collapses into the vat of beans being cooked for a horde of hungry schoolboys? Answer: You serve it up anyway! Why let a few lumps of clay and the odd metal screw spoil a decent meal? When Bunmi Asaolu arrived at the grand gates of St. John/Mary's Unity Secondary School (SAJOMACO) as a first-year student, you'd be forgiven for assuming he was swapping life on the serene university campus he grew up on for another of equal civility. Wrong! Behind the gates of SAJOMACO lay a world of contradictions.

Kamil Idris, a man proud of his nomad ancestry, survived child labor in darkened factories, boyhood journeys to Cairo balanced on the top of trains, hazardous treks to Europe in his teens, capture and death threats from piratical Nile fishermen who thought he was an evil spirit or djinn, and even being stranded in the ferocious heat of the Nubian desert.

In early November 1834, an aristocratic young couple from Savannah and South Carolina sailed from New York and began a seventeen-year odyssey in West Africa. Leighton and Jane Wilson sailed along what was for them an exotic coastline, visited cities and villages, and sometimes ventured up great rivers and followed ancient paths.