Bead Bai A novel by Sultan Somjee Published by CreateSpace and available through Amazon March 2013, pages 450 You look at the cover of Kenyan ethnographer and writer (currently living in Canada) Sultan Somjee's Bead Bai with a kind of reverence that is reserved for the Mona Lisa or works by the old masters. The portrait of Sakina, a Khoja bride in wildest Kenya of the late 1930s, early 1940s, is no major artwork by any stretch of the imagination, however pumped with emotion you are. Even with a smiling face, tears running down the side of your face, your heart overrunning with a loving melancholia, it is not a face you would pay two cents worth of attention. In fact, in today's currency it is a face that is fairly nondescript. However, if like me, you look at the face again after reading the 450-page tome, you would be forgiven for losing yourself in sheer rapture of the woman who has made you fall in love with her story, her spirituality, her love f...
Goans, East Africans et al