The Raped Amulet

written by Sammy Oke Akombi

An extraordinary story of a young man from Africa who tries hard to reconcile the ways he had grown up with, and those he was experiencing in his host country – Great Britain. The story is set in Coventry, in the English Midlands and is told by Dion Ekpochaba, a postgraduate student at the University of Warwick. Dion, fresh from his motherland, Cameroon, loses an amulet, a cherished heritage of his ancestry and becomes desperate about the loss. He meets an elderly English man, Tom Jones who makes a startling revelation: the amulet had just been desecrated by his dog and thrown into the depths of a lake in the campus. Dion became so flabbergasted that Tom Jones thought he might have gone out of his mind. The two strangers tried to understand each other to no avail. However, the misfortunes of time turn the tides, resulting in a friendship, which provides grounds for mutual understanding and respect for each other’s ways.

Sammy Oke Akombi

Sammy Oke Akombi is Cameroonian, born in Tinto, Manyu Division. He was educated at the Teachers colleges in Batibo and Nyasoso respectively, the Bilingual Grammar School, Buea, the University of Lagos, Nigeria and the University of Warwick, U.K. He holds an M.A in ELT and is an honorary Fellow in Writing of the University of Iowa, USA. He is currently the Director of the Southwest Provincial Linguistic Centre, Buea, Cameroon.