And now that I've finally read Lawrence Hill's novel, The Book of Negroes, I can fully understand and appreciate the acclaim that he has received by reviewers and the reading public.  It is a magnificent, fully-realized book.  If the author's singular purpose was to convey to a wider public, from his perspective as a black man and the son of parents involved in human rights - as I believe it was primarily - the dreadful calamity that results from humans preying on one another, he succeeded.

His writing skills and ability to portray the life of a young African girl, through years of security within her parents' ancestral village, on to her eventual abduction, voyage to another world and slavery into maturity and all the heartbreaks she encountered on that voyage, are superb.  He earned the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and the esteem that accompanies it.

The plight of innocent people abducted from their homes, their families, their clans, their country of origin and transported under dreadful conditions which to survive represented a miracle in and of itself, is one known to many, in general.  The details gleaned from this writer's careful research represent a journey into the nature of human behaviour that completely lacks empathy and honour.

The lovingly detailed description in the persona of a young girl violently kidnapped after she was witness to the murder of her beloved father, taken along with other helpless and vulnerable innocents on a long overland journey in Africa to the coast where they were boarded onto a slaving ship is heart-rending.  The journey to North America and the tremendous alterations taking place in the minds of those forced into slavery, the drear conditions of life they are exposed to, the misery and heartache described feelingly and intuitively, cannot help but move anyone exposed to it with a feeling of deep personal involvement.

This is a stirring, affecting saga of slavery in the 18th, sliding into the 19th Century.  One where African-upon-African prey is deftly described, as a source of trade and income, and where the abomination of white-upon-black domination is described to perfection.  This story of human degradation, pain, suffering, despair, resignation and finally hope should receive as large an audience as possible.

If only to inform people of the depths to which humanity can fall, and in reverse, to which it can raise itself through defiance and courage.