"A novel in verse about a boy escaping slavers during the nineteenth century"-- 11-year-old Kofi Offin dreams of water. Its mysterious, immersive quality. The rich, earthy scent of the current. The clearness, its urgent whisper that beckons with promises and secrets ... Kofi has heard the call on the banks of Upper Kwanta, in the village where he lives. He loves these things above all else: his family, the fireside tales of his father's father, a...

The adventures of a 12-year-old African boy sold into slavery by his father to pay off a debt. The setting is East Africa, a place of trade caravans, tribal warfare and the beginnings of European colonization.

"In the years just before the Civil War, during the most intensive phase of American slave-trade suppression, the U.S. Navy seized roughly 2,000 enslaved Africans from illegal slave ships and brought them into temporary camps at Key West and Charleston. In this study, Sharla Fett reconstructs the social world of these "recaptives" and recounts the relationships they built to survive the holds of slave ships, American detention camps, and, ultimately,...

In the 1860s two African boys are taken captive and mistakenly left in the care of David Livingstone, whom they accompany on his quest to find a way to stop the slave trade and to open the interior of Africa to missionaries.