Alan Huffman was returning home to Bolton from Oxford when he heard Saturday that Nigeria had agreed to return former Liberian President Charles Taylor to his home country.
During the 1990s, Taylor supported the Revolutionary United Front that wanted to take control of the diamond mines in Liberia.
The weapons he gave members of the NPS helped unleash a rampage of murder, mutilation and kidnapping in the country.
He was charged in 2003 for war crimes.
It ws during this civil war that Huffman sought to go across the Atlantic and finish researching his book, "Mississippi in Africa."
He had to wait.
Then, finally, Huffman decided the civil war wouldn't end anytime soon.
So he went. "Fortunately the fighting wasn't in our area."
Huffman, 50, finished his book, "Mississippi in Africa: The Saga of the Slaves in Prospect" and it came out in 2004.
On Monday, Huffman and others will be featured at Turnrow Book Co.'s "Afrossippi Blues: From Africa to Mississippi and Back Again."
The event begins at 8 p.m. in the book store at 311 Howard St.
Huffman, a former reporter for The Clarion-Ledger who currently freelances for national publications such as the Los Angeles Times, will talk about the slaves of a Mississippi plantation whose owner freed them at his death and how they returned to Africa.
Those former slaves established a life not unlike the one they'd known and eventually crossed with members of the tribes that lived in the area.
In addition to Hoffman, Guelel Kumba, a bluesman from Senegal, will be on hand. He makes Oxford his home now, and folks around Taylor Street Grocery and other Mississippi haunts know his music.
Kumba as part of Afrossippi released a recording last October, called "Fulani Journey," which combines the North Mississippi hills sounds with Sengalese tones.
And Cynthia Shearer, author of "The Celestial Jukebox," is expected to read and talk about her second novel set in the mythical Madagascar, Mississippi.
Shearer, 50, is former curator of Rowan Oak in Oxford, once owned by Nobel-prize winning author William Faulkner.
