Book Launch: Between Starshine and Clay

Award-winning author and cultural critic Sarah Ladipo Manyika takes us on a remarkable journey across contemporary cultural and political landscapes as she speaks with 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 across the African Diaspora who have been deeply involved in shaping the public discourse. With grace and exuberance, Manyika searches for truth with poet Claudia Rankine and historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr, who leads the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research (the largest such center in the world) at Harvard University. She discusses race and gender with South African filmmaker Xoliswa Sithole and American actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith. She interrogates the world around us with pioneering publisher Margaret Busby, 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. We also meet the living embodiment of the many threads, ideas, and histories in this book through the extraordinary profile of Manyika’s fabulous 102-year-old friend, Mrs Willard Harris. 

Each encounter is incisive, erudite, deep and yet broad-ranging; together they represent a vital gathering of ideas that speak to us all – on racial reckoning and decolonisation, structural inequalities, and the role of the artist, activist and public intellectual in society. Each conversation and profile 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 ‘oyinbo’ in Nigeria, African in England, Arab in France, coloured in Southern 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.

This event will be in person and chaired by Professor Fareda Banda. 

Please contact cas@soas.ac.uk if you have any queries regarding this event.