Gerald Oluchi Ibe

Ikenga Quest Gerald Oluchi Ibe

A 4000 year civilization resurrects and seeks out a sick teenage African boy in Peckham... Umemnaeku collapsed yet again on his nineteenth birthday to the mysterious illness that has challenged him since childhood. His African born single mother in utter desperation consults a West Indian voodoo priestess in their Peckham neighbourhood and to her horror learned that what ails her son was from her long forgotten home in Africa. In his desperation to overcome his challenge, Umemnaeku embarks on a quest that stretched back over four thousand years, revealing an ancient civilization he never believed possible. Through ancient sacred rituals benumbing to a modern mind still kept alive by his father's people, he inherits the sacred role his forbears bore as the guardian of the great Ikenga stolen by the British in 1911. Each step was dodged by the British ultra secret order; Sophie Luminare, dreaded more than the Mason. Meandering in-between the pages is the love-hate relationship between Igbo-African civilization and the British cutting across the Atlantic slave trade, the American independence and subsequent civil war, the Haitian Igbo revolution and colonization of the Dominican Republic, the second world war, Nigerian independence struggle, the Igbo-Biafra war for independence and the return of the great Ikenga.