The Village of the Water Spirits: The Dreams of African Americans

In researching the patterns black people's dreams about white people Michael Ortiz Hill, the author of Dreaming the End of the World, dug into the literature on the African worlds that black Americans came out of and found that those worlds were intact in their nightly dreams. Although he couldn't grasp the implications, it was irrefutable that black Americans were dreaming whites in exactly the same fashion that Bantu people have understood whiteness since the Portuguese first made contact with the kingdom of the Kongo in the fifteenth century. This discovery led Ortiz Hill to Africa where he was initiated into tribal medicine. Weaving scholarship and interviews with the Shona medicine man Mandaza Augustine Kandemwa, Ortiz Hill offers the recognition that, at the most intimate level, Africa has kept faith with the African-American soul.