Narrative
Kossoh Town Boy
Robert Wellesley Cole · 1960
Synopsis
A surgeon recounts his childhood in Kossoh Town, a district of Freetown, in the 1910s: the family home, the parents who watch over him, the schools he enters, and the way the education he received from his father, his mother and his teachers gradually shaped the boy he was. The narrative, told simply, with frankness and humour, keeps to the childhood years and leaves aside the career that followed.
Context
The book was published in 1960 by Cambridge University Press, in one hundred and ninety-one pages, a year before the country's independence, after London publishers had turned down an earlier autobiography project. It became a school book, reprinted in both hardback and paperback. In 1988 the author published a second book of memoirs, more frank and richly documented, devoted to his years in England.
Who it is for
Fewer than two hundred pages, in English, never translated into French. It is better to know that the Creoles of Freetown are in large part descended from Africans freed from slave ships.
Prizes and reception
Having become a frequently reprinted school book, it is now among the books recommended by the First Lady of Sierra Leone.
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