Marais, Tuan

Because storytellers were the only custodians of Africa's great history, the continent is rich with stories and as a colonial interloper the author has taken his cue from Africa's fireside orators. Born in South Africa, raised in Zanzibar and schooled in Kenya, the only child from an eccentric and dysfunctional family he felt the need to write from an early age. The rich, neglected history of his forebears died with them and this inspired him to tell a story. After Zanzibar's revolution in 1964, he was stranded in the country of his birth and finding the doors to the island closed forever, he