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Listen to Your Footsteps: Reflections and Essays
Kojo Baffoe embodies what it is to be a contemporary African man. Of Ghanaian and German heritage, he was raised in Lesotho and moved to South Africa at the age of 27. Forever curious, Kojo has the enviable ability to simultaneously experience moments intimately and engage people (and their views) sincerely, while remaining detached enough to think through his experiences critically. He has earned a reputation as a thinker, someone who lives outside the box and free of the labels that society seeks to place on us.
Listen to Your Footsteps is an honest and, at times, raw collection of essays from a son, a father, a husband, a brother and a man deeply committed to doing the internal work. Kojo reflects on losing his mother as a toddler, being raised by his father, forming an identity, living as an immigrant, his tussles with substance abuse, as well as his experiences of fatherhood, marriage and making a career in a fickle industry. He gives an extended glimpse into the experiences that make boys become men, and the battles that make men discover what they are made of, all the while questioning what it means to be ‘a man’.
Listen to Your Footsteps is an honest and, at times, raw collection of essays from a son, a father, a husband, a brother and a man deeply committed to doing the internal work. Kojo reflects on losing his mother as a toddler, being raised by his father, forming an identity, living as an immigrant, his tussles with substance abuse, as well as his experiences of fatherhood, marriage and making a career in a fickle industry. He gives an extended glimpse into the experiences that make boys become men, and the battles that make men discover what they are made of, all the while questioning what it means to be ‘a man’.
353 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 28, 2021
Listen to Your Footsteps is a collection of essays, thoughts and poems on Kojo Baffoe's journey to date and the lessons he has learned and continue to learn. The anthology takes the reader through the interesting twists and turns of his life.
Baffoe's father, a huge influence in his life, features prominently in the essays, including about the huge collections of his music and books that he hasn't done justice to their digitisation and disposal respectively. He says a lot about his father - on business, life in general, books and music. There's even a section that starts the book - Like Father, Like Son
This is an easy to read and interesting book. I read it over one sitting.
A reader will find all sorts of nuggets to take away. My most appealing parts of the book are those that deal with books, poetry, writing and music. He has been writing his whole and was part of the Johannesburg poetry scene before 'retiring' from poetry.
I enjoyed the book back to back. It is well written and Baffoe leads an interesting life.
Baffoe's father, a huge influence in his life, features prominently in the essays, including about the huge collections of his music and books that he hasn't done justice to their digitisation and disposal respectively. He says a lot about his father - on business, life in general, books and music. There's even a section that starts the book - Like Father, Like Son
This is an easy to read and interesting book. I read it over one sitting.
A reader will find all sorts of nuggets to take away. My most appealing parts of the book are those that deal with books, poetry, writing and music. He has been writing his whole and was part of the Johannesburg poetry scene before 'retiring' from poetry.
I enjoyed the book back to back. It is well written and Baffoe leads an interesting life.
September 11, 2021
A Refreshing, Innovative, Engaging Read
What a beautiful book!
The joy of reading this book is in its natural yet profound simplicity. A biography like no other I have read, Kojo Baffoe’s offers the story of his life not of the kind to indulge the curiosity of a voyeur, but to convert a reader into being a participant in the full awareness of every moment in which one breathes in and out in the unfolding and unpredictable journeys of life.
Yet, with a simplicity almost miraculous, the experience lived in unpredictable moments enable some measure of preparedness to manage the unknown future as you find yourself in small and brief dramas of life as well as in big and drawn out ones.
Yet both, and almost equally, offer lessons that the book does not teach, as such, but invites you to participate in, in what one can call lived learning. The result is wisdom as simple as it is profound. Every life, in every way, matters.
Part of the pleasure of the book is in its short, uneven, episodic chapters in which narrative is suddenly followed by poetry, followed essay, followed by a longish epigram, and all culminating in the most unusual acknowledgement, and then concluded with echoes of the themes of the author’s story that seize your attention and summarize everything for your memory like credits at the end of a movie.
But in this book the credits are still part of a story that goes on and on, without a conclusion, not because Kojo Baffoe is still alive, but because he too will one day be as alive as his father in “formless form”, to use Mmatshilo Motsei’s expression in her book Hearing Visions, Seeing Voices.
What a beautiful book!
The joy of reading this book is in its natural yet profound simplicity. A biography like no other I have read, Kojo Baffoe’s offers the story of his life not of the kind to indulge the curiosity of a voyeur, but to convert a reader into being a participant in the full awareness of every moment in which one breathes in and out in the unfolding and unpredictable journeys of life.
Yet, with a simplicity almost miraculous, the experience lived in unpredictable moments enable some measure of preparedness to manage the unknown future as you find yourself in small and brief dramas of life as well as in big and drawn out ones.
Yet both, and almost equally, offer lessons that the book does not teach, as such, but invites you to participate in, in what one can call lived learning. The result is wisdom as simple as it is profound. Every life, in every way, matters.
Part of the pleasure of the book is in its short, uneven, episodic chapters in which narrative is suddenly followed by poetry, followed essay, followed by a longish epigram, and all culminating in the most unusual acknowledgement, and then concluded with echoes of the themes of the author’s story that seize your attention and summarize everything for your memory like credits at the end of a movie.
But in this book the credits are still part of a story that goes on and on, without a conclusion, not because Kojo Baffoe is still alive, but because he too will one day be as alive as his father in “formless form”, to use Mmatshilo Motsei’s expression in her book Hearing Visions, Seeing Voices.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews