The Native Boy: An Autobiography of a Man From Nyakke

William Reeves' autobiography provides one among many Liberian voices that have been missing from African literary production in the post Colonial era. Is Native Boy a postcolonial text? Reeves documents a life in which his earliest indentification was as a Grebo village child and his subsequent 70-some years of experience lead him to call himself a Liberian, still a Grebo, and most definitely an educator. Now, when most news reports of liberia include the soundbite that the nation was founded by freed slaves from the United States in the 1840s, William Reeves offers a point of view by someone whose ancestors preceded those freed American slaves in the geographical and cultural space that is Liberia. His story is an important challenge to international views of liberia, to post-Colonial theories, to the literary history of Africa.