Years ago, I met a friend in London I had not seen in many years. He posed a very interesting question to me. He wanted me to give him a statement on Jomo Kenyatta, who was then incarcerated as the leader of the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya. Though I did not have an answer for my friend, I kept his question in my mind. Then, years later, my wife and I decided to visit Kenya on Safari with friends, which I recount here, vividly in this book. They were like two birds set free, hoop the coop, flew away from their prison abode, caged for decades, until Februrary 1990, on that sunny day in Capetown when I saw Nelson Mandella, live on CNN Television with his wife Winnie Mandela. They strolled through the gates of pollsmore Prison, away from 37 years of incarceration by the Apartheid Regime. That experience intrigued me enough that my wife and I decided, with a group of friends, to visit South Africa and see what would happen to us as a group of African Americans; it was while there that I touched yellow, Ebony Gold, as detailed in my book.

At the age of thirty-three, Ekow Eshun—born in London to African-born parents—travels to Ghana in search of his roots. He goes from Accra, Ghana’s cosmopolitan capital city, to the storied slave forts of Elmina, and on to the historic warrior kingdom of Asante. During his journey, Eshun uncovers a long-held secret about his lineage that will compel him to question everything he knows about himself and where he comes from. From the London suburbs of his childhood to the twenty-first century African metropolis, Eshun’s is a moving chronicle of one man’s search for home, and of the pleasures and pitfalls of fashioning an identity in these vibrant contemporary worlds.

Birds of Western Africa (Helm, 2001) was the first single-volume guide to cover all the species of this region, which comprises 23 countries from Senegal and southern Mauritania east to Chad and the Central African Republic, and south to Congo. This new edition uses all of the plates from Birds of Western Africa, with a concise, authoritative text on facing pages, to create a conveniently-sized, lightweight field reference covering all 1300 species found in the region. The book also has updated colour distribution maps for each species placed on the text pages for the first time. A number of new images have been painted for this new edition and several of the illustrations have been replaced. This major new guide will enable birders to identify any species found in any of the countries covered.

"Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers." In an ancient world divided by colors, where everyone wears masks, superstitions abound, and mysterious creatures called the Harlequins exist... Here, a clever teen of the Black Chromes named Asheva loses everything he's ever known and embarks on a treacherous and exciting journey that takes him through the wild forests of the Black Nation to the vast plains of Ayas, a Blue Chrome city of astounding beauty, where further danger lies. But the journey will also result in an astounding truth, when Asheva ultimately discovers that beneath the masks all Chromes wear, nothing is what it seems.