Barbara Kingsolver’s, The Poisonwood Bible, is written so beautifully and reads so effortlessly that it surely will be seen as one of fiction’s greatest achievements in the second half of the last century. The story of a missionary zealot going to Africa in 1959 with his wife and four girls in tow to convert Congolese souls is a simple one until suddenly it’s not. Africa and its peoples live by the rules of nature and culture and when the Reverend ignores this through arrogance, pride and stupidity he changes lives forever, just not the ones he wanted. If God does harshly judge the Tribes of Ham rest assured He will do the same ten-fold to those agents of change; the ones that stripped Africa of its natural resources, those that forced alien religious customs, and the greedy warmongering politicians responsible for deaths of untold millions. I once heard Richard Leakey say, “Anthropologically speaking, we are all of African origin”. That seems like a good point of reference to begin moving forward from this dark period of a Continent no longer dark.