A Letter to My Dying Mother

Book excerpt: What a world we live in! Whereas in some places residents have to fight hard to resist the temptation not to overfeed themselves, at other places people are threatened at best with malnutrition, if not starvation. In this readable and entertaining book, the author, who came from Ghana to become a medical doctor in Germany, sets out to highlight some of these inequalities as he attempts to compare and contrast the simple and communal lifestyle of a traditional African society with the sophisticated and egocentric one he found in Western society. Addressed to his mother in her final battle with death, and sent through a fictitious courier, it attempts, among other things, to give her, a woman who spent all her life in a typical African countryside, an idea of the things she would have seen and experienced on a visit to her son resident in the northern German city of Hannover. The book is an invaluable guide for anyone from a developing country who for the first time visits or wishes to settle in the West; but it will also be read with keen interest by people in the West wishing to know more of traditional African society.