Our Story Starts in Africa
Paloma lives in England and is visiting family in Trinidad. While she and her cousins ostensibly speak the same language, they find it difficult to understand one another and the cousins comment that Paloma cannot be family because she speaks differently from them. Paloma’s Tante Janet takes this opportunity to reveal the history which has led to the African diaspora. She introduces this by explaining the similarity of the comb they are using to those found by scientists on the banks of the Nile.
Paloma and Tante Janet talk about warrior queens, the library of Alexandria, African kingdoms, slavery, and colonialism, and there is an appendix to the story with more details and some further reading appropriate to the age group at which this picture book is aimed.
Patrice Lawrence is an award-winning author of children’s and YA novels, many of which have contemporary settings but are increasingly having historical settings, such as Diver’s Daughter: A Tudor Story. In an afterword, she describes how this current book is inspired by her own childhood experiences.
In her first children’s book, illustrator and designer Jeanetta Gonzales demonstrates her love of nature and bold colour in portraying the fruit and flora of the Caribbean. An especially effective illustration shows Tante Janet’s hands cutting a lime into pieces while she speaks about how ‘They cut Africa into chunks. Our lands were chopped up, mixed up and squashed together’. For clear contrast, scenes that are set in the past are in sepia tones.
While painful aspects of African history are not glossed over, the atmosphere created overall by this book is positive. A complex, multi-faceted story is told skilfully, simply without being simplistic, raising questions that will encourage children to find out more.
