Citizen Dialogue

Gogo Mama intimately profiles the lives of twelve very different African women. They include a genocide survivor from Rwanda; a pygmy who lives in a grass hut at the base of a volcano in the Congo; Zanzibar’s most famous living diva; a former child soldier from Liberia; a grandmother fighting AIDS in South Africa; a freed slave from Ghana, who as a child was given to a priest as a sacrifice for crimes committed by an ancestor; a famous Egyptian belly dancer turned movie star; and a pioneering midwife from Timbuktu. The women speak frankly about their astonishing lives, past and present, in some of the most hostile and exotic parts of the continent.

This book is a journey across Africa, in all its complexity - from the townships of Johannesburg, to the back alleys of Zanzibar; from the frontline of the war in the Sudan, to the nightclubs of Cairo. It is a vivid, illuminating and often haunting composite picture of an extraordinary continent, in the words of the people who know it best.

Sally Sara was the ABC’s African Correspondent for over 5 years and is now back as a reporter for the ABC-TV series ‘landline’. She has reported from more than 25 countries, including Iraq, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Zimbabwe. In order to gather interviews for Gogo Mama, she spent more than six months traveling solo across Africa.

Read more about the book at Amazon.com.