Yoruba Girl Dancing

Lively colors, big gatherings, tribal festivals, parents, grandparents, servants... for Remi, growing up in Nigeria is a celebration of love and family, eccentricity and old ritual. She feels confident in her privilege and grounded in the heart of her culture. But when she turns six, as if by some awful spell, she is sent to faraway England, to a posh all-girls' boarding school where she will stay for what seems like a desolate, lonely eternity. There, like the heroine of The Little Princess, she's left to find her own way - the only black in a school full of upper-class English girls whose rituals are as foreign to Remi as hers are to them. Through sheer inner exuberance, Remi triumphs over the dismal climate, social anomalies, and glaring affronts that are her English experience. She endures foreign holidays celebrated with strangers, and navigates the labyrinth of race, caste, and culture, taking nothing lying down, and emerges victorious - if changed forever. Yoruba Girl Dancing is the story of a girl's exile from her homeland and her metamorphosis into someone that even she at times hardly recognizes. Simi Bedford, who herself survived leaving Africa behind for England, tells of her young heroine's passage with a knowing wit that is simultaneously sharp and gracious, in a coming-of-age story with a brilliant edge.