Africville

Africville

Written and Illustrated by: Shauntay Grant

Illustrated by: Eva Campbell

Published by: Groundwood Books

Published on: September 4, 2018

Ages: 4+

A young girl visits the site of Africville near Halifax, Nova Scotia, and imagines the life of her great grandmother and other residents during the 150 years it was a bustling community, before it was ruined by the Halifax government in the 1960s.  The stories passed down through her family give her a daydream about how this community fared on sunny summer days so long ago. Children playing and adults bustling around - Eva Campbell's art brings the past to life.

But when her daydream is broken she is in an uninhabited park, Africville having long been relocated by Haligonians.

An excellent book about both amazing and shameful events in Canada's history. Lovely to see Black Joy in picture book form for Canadian kids.

This sparked some interesting discussions in my house on how municipal planning has been used to enforce systemic racism, in Canada and other countries. Black Canadians were left out of my textbooks as a child, but books like this show my kids how important they were in Canada for hundreds of years, and will be into the future.