Between Starshine and Clay

Conversations with the most distinguished black thinkers of our times, including Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, Wole Soyinka and Michelle Obama, on race, decolonisation, systemic inequalities, and the climate crisis.

WITH A FOREWORD FROM BERNARDINE EVARISTO In a series of incisive and intimate encounters Sarah Ladipo Manyika introduces some of the most distinguished Black thinkers of our times, including Nobel Laureates Toni Morrison and Wole Soyinka, and civic leaders first lady Michelle Obama and Senator Cory Booker. She searches for truth with poet Claudia Rankine and historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. She discusses race and gender with South African filmmaker Xoliswa Sithole and American actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith. She interrogates the world around us with pioneering publisher Margaret Busby, parliamentarian Lord Michael Hastings and civil rights activist Pastor Evan Mawarire - who dared to take on President Robert Mugabe and has lived to tell the tale. We also meet the living embodiment of the many threads, ideas and histories in this book through the profile of her fabulous 102-year-old friend, Mrs Willard Harris. In journeys that book-end the collection, Sarah Ladipo Manyika reflects on her own experience of being seen as 'oyinbo' in Nigeria, African in England, Arab in France, coloured in Southern Africa and Black in America, while feeling the least Black and most human among her fellow travellers, explorers all, against the sharp white relief of the South Pole.