Vamba Sherif PHOTO CREDIT: Victor Dlamini Time of the Writer Festival South Africa, 2007 BIOGRAPHY Vamba Sherif was born in northern Liberia in 1973. He spent a substantial part of his youth in Kuwait, where he completed high school. While there he immersed himself in Arab, European and African literature. Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, he was forced to flee for his life to the Netherlands, where he read law. The dual thrusts of exile and loneliness combined with an intuition that his memories and anxieties should be committed to paper drove him to writing: “…I reached back into my memories and wrote down stories. Stories that my grandmother had told me in Liberia." The result was his first novel, Het Land van de Vaders (The Land of the Fathers1999), published at the age of 26. The Land of the Fathers connects the civil war in Liberia with the return of freed slaves from America. The interactions between the tribes and the returnees were characterized by ignorance and prejudice on both sides, which did not cease with the end of the nineteenth century but which resulted in a civil war a hundred years later. One of the two central characters, Edward Richards, a former slave, tries to find his place in the country of his African roots, while the other, Halay, answers the call of an oracle and voluntarily sacrifices his life to avert all wars in his homeland. The novel was well-received with the Algemeen Dagblad calling it “enthralling”, whilst De Groener Amsterdammer commented: “A book like a warm fireside; a novel you want to crawl into.” Sherif's second novel, Het Koninkijk van Sebah (The kingdom of Sebah, 2003), tells the story of an African family that arrives in the Netherlands and deals with their attempt to negotiate the challenges posed by a new culture and environment. His most recent novel, Bound to Secrecy (Zwijgplicht 2007) is concerned with the theme of power and uses the detective medium to explore power at different levels of society. In the novel, a man is sent to investigate the disappearance of an African paramount chief, only to discover that his behaviour is exactly like the man he came to investigate. The novel explores the interplay of powers, both visible and invisible. It reflects today's world, with forces pitted against each other, each determined to destroy the other. In addition to three African languages, Sherif speaks English, Arabic and Dutch fluently. Bibliography Bound to Secrecy, De Geus, 2007 The Kingdom of Sebah, De Geus, 2003 The Land of the Fathers, De Geus, 1999