Between Starshine and Clay

Foreword by Bernardine Evaristo

Award-winning author and cultural critic Sarah Ladipo Manyika takes us on a remarkable journey across contemporary cultural and political landscapes as she talks to some of the most distinguished black thinkers of our times, including Nobel Laureates Toni Morrison and Wole Soyinka, and civic leaders First Lady Michelle Obama and Senator Cory Booker.

We meet activists, artists and intellectuals who have been deeply involved in shaping the gripping debates of public discourse. With grace and energy, Manyika searches for truth with poet Claudia Rankine and historian Henry Louis Gates, who leads the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University (the world's largest such centre). She discusses race and gender with South African filmmaker Xoliswa Sithole and American actor Anna D. Smith. She interrogates the world around us with parliamentarian Lord Michael Hastings and civil-rights activist Pastor Evan Mawarire, who dared to take on President Robert Mugabe and lived to tell the tale.

Each encounter is incisive, powerful and erudite; together they represent a vital gathering of ideas that speak to us all: on racial reckoning and decolonisation, structural and systemic inequalities, and the role of the artist, activist, and public intellectual in society. Each conversation is also intimate and special, allowing for deep insights into the complex issues discussed. While these are well-known figures and exemplary in their respective fields, Manyika's skill, warmth and unique friendship with each allow us to see the person behind their public profile.

In journeys that book-end the collection, Manyika reflects on her own experience of being seen as white in Nigeria, African in England, Arab in France, coloured in South Africa and black in America, while feeling the least black and most human among her fellow travellers, explorers all, against the sharp white relief of the South Pole.