Where Witch Birds Fly

Where Witch Birds Fly takes Richard White and us into the languorous, semi-surreal world of post-colonial Africa. It's 1985. The British are gone, as are the French, the Spanish and the Portuguese before them. Now it's the Lebanese ruling the commercial roost making fortunes off Sierra Leone's storied diamond reserves.

When Richard White is sent to Sierra Leone on behalf of his client, Mobil Oil, to collect a $40 million debt, he falls into a rabbit hole of corruption, Big Diamonds, and bizarre cold-war politics that soon has White sipping cocktails and playing volleyball with ambassadors from the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba, and almost every other rogue nation on earth. (For centuries Russia has sought a warm, deepwater natural harbor for its fleet. The harbor in Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, is ideal).

Hawkins does a masterful job of evoking the sultry insouciance of the expatriate and ambassadorial classes' bacchanals in protected country clubs while the black masses are barely surviving. Sierra Leone is a world of massive inequities cause by centuries of white exploitation - much like a part of his home country, as White begins to realize.

Harkins portrays with sensitivity and passion the deepening identity crisis of his protagonist, catalyzed by his visit to Sa'L'one, as the locals call it in their charming patois, which Harkins captures beautifully. The people his protagonist meets while in Sierra Leone are for the most part charming and innocent. But passivity finally gives way to desperation and rage, and civil war explodes in March of 1991, tearing the country and its people apart for more than a decade. The rebel's calling card - the wanton amputations of thousands of innocent men, women and children -gained international notoriety, ultimately resulting in the establishment of a UN War Crimes Tribunal. Charles Tayler, the ex-president of Liberia, is slated to be tried shortly in the Hague for Crimes Against Humanity. It was Taylor who is thought to have fomented the bloody war, profiting fabulously from the trade in blood diamonds and armaments.

This is a compelling book, for the light it shines on black history and for the skillful way the author depicts it in the life of an extraordinary African-American man who has achieved remarkable success in the white man's world, a world where today no one is quite sure whether calling a black man 'articulate' is an insult or a compliment.

Eugene Harkins is a lawyer and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Rutgers College. He has a J.D. from Rutgers School of Law and an advanced degree in international, foreign and comparative law from New York University. He began his career with the State Department and then served as staff attorney for Gulf Oil Company Latin America. A past head of the International Law Department of Blackwell, Walker, Gray in Miami, he also served as General Counsel for Texaco Latin America/West Africa. Harkins has worked and traveled in some 65 countries and is multi-lingual and multi-cultural.

Booktours.com
Author: Eugene Harkins
ISBN: 9780932863492
RRP: $14.95