Real and Beautiful

I loved that it was written from the perspective of the persons who were there. For it gave a picture of the environment and its mixture of culture and greed, poverty, personalities and the feelings and frustrations of that everyday life. it was purely real and I could see it and feel it and identify with it.

5 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

When does it start

I'm stuck about an hour or two in. I keep wanting the adventure to start and instead we're on character development and back story. It got good reviews and it's probably powerful literature, I just can't seem to get into it.

2 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Brilliantly written story

The story telling style and writing is brilliant. However, it would have been easier for Kiswahili speakers to perform this brilliant piece of work. The performers obviously did their best, but the intonation was off and it impacted on the flow of the story telling.

1 personne a trouvé cela utile

It’s a hard one to listen to-read the book

I’m embarrassed to say that I struggled to understand fully what the narrators said. My ear isn’t trained or familiar with many of the place names (which are all differently called now) or the switching between Arabic, Swahili and other languages for objects and people’s names/titles. There is a glossary provided but it’s difficult to pause the narration and try to remember exactly how the word was pronounced to look it up. For these reasons, I believe reading this book would have been easier. The story is interesting though. It got me thinking and learning more outside of this book about Dr. Livingstone and his interesting life.

Slow paced

Extremely slow paced, I understand it was a view from the African perspective. But what it really showed as what the Muslim slave traders did a real number of those Africans.
Without accepting, and living by the words of Christianity entire continent will remain in the 16th century.