Between Africa and the West

Where is home? There were plenty of twists and turns in Sahr Yambasu's journey from a small remote village in Sierra Leone to becoming a Christian missionary in Ireland, driving a taxi in Galway and having a home in Carlow and Bray. This is a story of that journey. In telling it, Dr. Yambasu deals with the important and global themes of culture, colonization, change, resistance, conversion, displacement, development, identity, prejudice and the longing for his home country. He does so in an illuminating, thought-provoking, refreshingly honest and engaging way. This is a very human story which many who have left home to make a living in a different country and culture can easily identify with. Here is a distinctive voice which needs to be heard.


What happens when a child in Africa sponsored by western charity grows up? Sahr John Yambasu was educated thanks to the philanthropy of a family of English Methodists and in the style of Edel Quinn made a pact with God to devote his life to spreading the Christian message. His route from frugal existence in Sierra Leone to life in ministry in Ireland, where he also became a war refugee, is told with great insight, humour and wisdom. The diaspora is a familiar theme in Irish literature but here we have the memoirs of an immigrant, a valuable realigning of the normal Irish perspective on the world. Sometimes moving and occasionally hilarious, Yambasu describes how he nearly gets himself run over crossing a street in Belfast just to greet another black man. As the father of three children in an inter-race marriage - and one, moreover, who has worked as a Galway taxi-driver - he also questions Ireland's avowed commitment to multiculturalism...a much wider audience will benefit from its reading.

Joe Humphreys
Irish Times journalist and author