The glory days of Timbuktu in the thirteen-hundreds, along with tales of the emperor whose wealth in gold bankrupted Egypt, flame in the chests of Professor Toure’s students at Sankore University each time he reads of their exploits from his prized manuscripts. In this year of 1706 on the western calendar, those days are no more. Yet, Toure, a leading scholar in linguistics allows his three motherless daughters access to his extensive personal library—a space forbidden to females. His girls, Adaeze, Bibi, and Folashade know their father’s rules. Chief among his strictures: No female may lay hands on the holy Qu’ran.
Meet the Characters of Scattered Seed
Daring Audacious Folashade
Folashade, at fourteen, Toure’s youngest child, early on flashes strength, daring, and audacioness that will carry her through horrors more terrifying than the worst nightmares. From cajoling her beloved Papa into cancelling her long-overdue full female circumcision, to protecting her traumatized eldest sister, Adaeze, to participating in a killing on the ship carrying all three sisters into slavery in the Americas, this teen-age girl displays the courage, talents, and skills that will allow her to not only survive her enslavement in the Americas, but to strategize a plan to keep her history and memory alive through the generations.
Bibi the Beautiful
Middle-sister, Bibi, considered the most beautiful of Toure’s attractive daughters, and already a mother at sixteen, knows the anguish of mistreatment at the hands of her husband’s favorite, and number one wife. On her terrifying physical and mental journey into the unknown, Bibi sacrifices her own honor and dignity to ease the pain of her sisters and fellow Bambara tribesmen and women as they are transported to the land of the barbarians.
Adaeze
Adaeze , married to the inept son of an even more inept King of Mali, drifts into a world of denial after she is humiliated in front of her tribespeople by a Frenchman leading a group of Wolof on a surprise beach front assault and kidnap in the Mali town of D’Jenne.
Charbonneau the French Renegade
Charbonneau, a French renegade with limited resources, and far outside the center of influence in the lucrative Atlantic slave trade controlled by imperial African power brokers along with European supplicants, believes he has found a way to achieve wealth despite being an outsider. He makes a deal with a group of Wolof tribesmen from a modest village near Dakar. Travel with Charbonneau to the far interior of Mali where no other slave trader has risked, capture a group of young men and march them back to the slave fort on Goree Island. Pay his minions a modest sum from the proceeds and pocket the rest.
Malick the Manipulator
Malick listens with respect as his Wolof elders frown their discontent at Charbonneau’s proposal. The Frenchman’s plan deemed an unnecessary risk to the young men of the village who must chance the rigors of months-long travel deep into the interior. Malick calculates the monetary and importance benefits of such a journey for his village and determines the hapless Frenchman can be manipulated with ease into believing he is in charge of the Wolof.