As I Run Toward Africa - A Memoir (Hardcover)

As I Run Toward Africa is the extraordinary memoir of a boy from a small South Georgia town and its antebellum traditions, seductions, and malices to his eventual position as the most prolific African American author. Asante s experience in the Geechee-Gullah milieu of Georgia s coastal plains with its mystic and plaintive longing for Africa propelled him toward a conscious grasp of the meaning of loss, displacement, and dislocation, leading him to develop ideas that would reorient what he called slave thinking toward a more useful centered thinking for peoples of African descent worldwide.One of the most poignant memoirs by an African American, this book takes the reader on a journey from the experiences of growing up black in the American South to the homes of presidents and kings in Africa. Born into a family of 16 children living in a two bedroom shack, Asante rose to become the first permanent director of UCLA s Center for Afro American Studies, the editor of the Journal of Black Studies, and a full professor at State University by the age of 30. The government of Ghana designate Asante officially as a traditional king in l996. During his journeys Asante recounts his interactions with many personalities who assisted him in focusing on restorative culture: Billie Sol Estes, Wole Soyinka, Maulana Karenga, Gwendolyn Brooks, Haki Madhubuti, Cornel West, Mary Lefkowitz, Sidney Willhelm, and others. As an intellectual who has met presidents, kings, queens, in Africa, Asante s compelling story is uplifting, instructive, and revealing about the nature of the human condition. "