The House at Sugar Beach

Here's another memoir about unrest in Africa. This time it is in Liberia. What makes this book unique from some of the other books of civil unrest in Africa, is the author's childhood of wealth and influence. Helene Cooper's family could trace their ancestry back to the first freeman who sailed from New York to found Monrovia. In 1820, the American Colonization Society dispatched a ship of 88 freeborn blacks to Africa's west coast in an attempt to reintroduce them to the country. Helene lives in a twenty-two mansion by the sea with her mother, father, sister and foster sister, Eunice. Helene's uncle is the Secretary of State and her cousin is the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Her family is part of the 5% Congo people who rule the country, the other 95% of the Liberian population, subsisting in poverty, are Country people.

When soldiers assassinate the president and execute his cabinet in 1980, Helen becomes part of the class who are hunted, shot, and tortured. Her family is lucky to have the means to leave for America but they leave Eunice behind. Helene goes to college and becomes a journalist. After going to Iraq and a near-death experience there, she decides she needs to return to Liberia and find Eunice again. Eunice, meanwhile, has lived through the experience making her own way and now living and working at Firestone. I especially liked the language in this book, it is written so you can hear the color of the local speech.
Susan