Gogo Mama

'Gogo Mama' intimately profiles the lives of twelve very different African women. They include a genocide survivor from Rwanda; a pygmy who lives in a grass hut at the base of a volcano in the Congo; Zanzibar's most famous living diva; a former child soldier from Liberia; a grandmother fighting AIDs in South Africa; a freed slave from Ghana, who as a child was given to a priest as a sacrifice for crimes committed by an ancestor; a famous Egyptian belly dancer turned movie star; and a pioneering midwife from Timbuktu.

The women speak frankly about their astonishing lives, past and present, in some of the most hostile and exotic parts of the continent. This book is a journey across Africa, in all its complexity. It is a vivid, illuminating and often haunting composite picture of an extraordinary continent, in the words of the people who know it best.