Thomas Lewis Johnson’s Africa for Christ was published in 1882. Reprinted in 1999, copies are available at £14. The book has 72 pages. Johnson had spent twenty-eight years in slavery in Virginia, moved to England for his education, worked in Cameroon as a Baptist missionary, and then promoted black-led Christian mission work in Africa in both the U.S.A. and Britain. He settled in London in the 1880s and then in Bournemouth where, in 1909, an enlarged Twenty-eight Years a Slave; Or, the Story of My Life in Three Continents was published. Originals cost £50 to £60. Copies are available at £25; and a reissued version by Hard Press appeared in 2012.

The 1909 book has been included in the University of North Carolina’s on line documentation – http://www.docsouth.unc.edu/neh.

Index to Building Your Library

#  1         Neil Parsons, King Khama, Emperor Joe and the Great White Queen. Tswana 1895

#  2         Nancy Cunard

#  3         Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson

#  4         Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

#  5         Brew family of Ghana and London

#  6         Booker T Washington; Chief Alfred Sam

#  7         Wellesley Cole, Kossoh Town Boy and An Innocent in Britain

#  8         Ira Aldridge

#  9         Paul Robeson, Negro, 1927

# 10       The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol 1

# 11       Jomo Kenyatta

# 12       Langston Hughes The Big Sea (1940) and Rampersad’s biography 1986, 1988

# 13       Percy Chen, China Called Me

# 14       Stimela Jingoes (Lesotho) recalled France in 1917; Herbert Julian Black Eagle memoir of a Trinidad aeroplane fanatic trained in 1910s England

# 15       Thomas L. Johnson, Twenty-eight Years a Slave (Bournemouth 1909)

# 16       Donald Hinds, Journey to an Illusion (1966).