Black Mamba Boy
SynopsisPlot
Yemen, 1935. Jama is a “market boy,” a half-feral child scavenging with his friends in the dusty streets of a great seaport. For Jama, life is a thrilling carnival, at least when he can fill his belly. When his mother—alternately raging and loving—dies young, she leaves him only an amulet stuffed with one hundred rupees. Jama decides to spend her life’s meager savings on a search for his never-seen father; the rumors that travel along clan lines report that he is a driver for the British somewhere in the north. So begins Jama’s extraordinary journey of more than a thousand miles north all the way to Egypt, by camel, by truck, by train, but mostly on foot. He slings himself from one perilous city to another, fiercely enjoying life on the road and relying on his vast clan network to shelter him and point the way to his father, who always seems just a day or two out of reach.
Story
About this book
In 1935 Aden, a busy port in what is now Yemen, a boy named Jama survives by scavenging with other market children. When his mother dies young, she leaves him an amulet holding one hundred rupees. Alone, he returns to Somalia, the land of his nomadic ancestors, but he cannot settle there. Rumors carried along clan lines say his father, absent since his infancy, works as a driver for the British somewhere to the north.
Jama spends his mother's small savings on the search. His route runs more than a thousand miles, through Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan and into Egypt, by camel, truck and train, but mostly on foot. He moves from one precarious city to the next, relying on a wide clan network for shelter and directions, while his father stays a day or two ahead.
The Second World War shapes the ground he crosses. Fascist Italian forces control parts of East Africa and prepare for battle, and Eritrea is already torn by fighting. Nadifa Mohamed drew this first novel from her own family history, following one child's displacement to show how the war reached African lives far from Europe's battlefields.
