Few books constitute a successful marriage between intellectual stimuli and contemporary history, and when they do, they oftentimes lose their audiences somewhere between the author’s opinion and the objective of the book itself. This is not the case in the 80-plus pages of ‘Walking in History: Sankofa - Our Trip to Ghana and Benin’. 
This manuscript, written by our three friends Carmen Bovell, Ph.D, Florence Jones Calhoun, M.Ed, and Desiree DeFlorimonte, Ph.D takes the readership on an 18-day journey to contemporary African landscapes, filling each step with ancestral pride, African monarchies, the slave-trade from a somewhat different perspective, and the cascade of emotions that swung like a pendulum from their tour of the Cape Coast Castle, the beginning of the African Holocaust, to the spell-binding beauty of quaint little villages and the busy traffic of Accra.
Readers will get a sense of belonging to the collage or woven fabric of mother Africa, as the authors guide us through their own experiences with people they encountered just like us, and places that help shape our identity that evolved from something mystical, something important. It is difficult to ignore the light-hearted manner in which the scholarly trio penned this book. Free from being self opinionated, ‘Walking in History: Sankofa - Our Trip to Ghana and Benin’ is focused on telling a story in raw-data fashion, untainted, seeking no partisan position, or attempting to persuade its readers, who by the way, are encouraged to draw their own conclusions about African culture, traditions, and ethnic roots.
I would be guilty of suppressing my own thoughts, if I did not mention that these three Guyanese authors rendered a first-hand account of a narrative that is mostly seen through the eyes of a different caricature, who oftentimes transfer his or her thoughts about Africa on to paper with no challenge to the possibility of bias; conversely, ‘Walking in History: Sankofa - Our Trip to Ghana and Benin’ simply documents the steps and encounters of three ladies with one mission, and that mission is to relate a history lesson as it unfolded truthfully before their very eyes.
Submitted by
Dr. Aubrey F. Bentham
Director of Special Projects - CAAAI
