The Father of Andromeda
In English
Trafford Publishing 2010
This story is an odyssey from the heart of Africa; a true story uncovered in letters over a period of thirty years, giving a unique insight into the human mind.
Chimuka, born in a remote Zambian village, meets a white woman near his secondary school. The year is 1979 and he is just seventeen. She is thirty three and a mother of two. This relationship will transform both their lives. The young man gives up his safety in traditional African living for a dream of higher education and a liberated life. He decides to follow the woman. He is at the start of a struggle for dignity and pride and finds himself in a maelstrom of cultural clashes, social opprobrium and personal upheaval. The woman is torn between the roles of lover, friend, breadwinner and mother. Each fatal choice leads to another and personal desolation is threatening.
After five years in Zambia and Kenya, they part, but they write. They write hundreds of letters, joyful letters and sorrowful letters; letters wrestling with existential agonies. Every aspect of life is addressed from the African perspective and from the Western point of view.
Thirty years pass. A broken man, marked by a hard and poverty-stricken life, finally sees through the law of spectacular dreams. He eventually reaches contentment and the woman answers the challenge of meeting him again in his village in Zambia. Older and wiser they meet, and in the shade of a venerable fig tree the stories, somehow never written in all those letters, pour spontaneously out, concluding at last the long search for the source of such a deep and powerful love.
