Meeting the invisible man - Toby Green

Exploring the extraordinarily vibrant spiritual world which underlies the surface of West Africa, this book examines the conflict between the traditional and the modern in a region whose culture is a melting pot of local, Islamic and European influences. Building on local narrative, we hear first hand the mysterious stories of invulnerability and invisibility retold from the author's own experiences . After accepting a potion from the local Grys-Grys, he curiously becomes invulnerable to the stabbings of a knife on his wrist, as the photographic evidence will testify. Or the equally bizarre journey in a taxi following a meeting with another local spiritualist who performed an invisibility charm on the author - it soon became obvious that the taxi driver didn't seem to think he was there at all and addressed only his companion, an unsettling experience reinforced shortly afterwards by the mad and erratic behaviour of his companion's dog towards the author's 'spiritual' presence.
Startling, strange and often extremely surreal, Toby Green challenges the 'safe', colonial assumptions of the West about this so-called 'exotic' region and highlights the disparity between iconic, mercantile Europe and a culture imbued with spiritualism at every level of life and an equally potent belief in the mysterious powers of the mind. Engaging the reader with themes as diverse as the histories of the slave trade and the kingdoms of West Africa, the invisible men of HG Wells and Ralph Ellison, Plato's simile of the cave and Marco Polo's observations about Zanzibar, the book is by turns mysterious, hilarious, beautiful and troubling. Confronting the dogmas of magic and modernity, Meeting the Invisible Man confirms Toby green as an exciting and imaginative travel writer, taking the reader in search of the unbelievable only to find that, after all, it is really quite believable.