Véronique Tadjo Launches In the Company of Men with Kwame Anthony Appiah

Tuesday, 5:00 pm EDT February 23, 2021

Online via Zoom

Author and poet Véronique Tadjo joins author and NYU Professor of Philosophy and Law Kwame Anthony Appiah to celebrate the U.S. launch of her much-lauded novel In the Company of Men. Timely and relevant, the novel tells the story of the inception and rapid spread of the Ebola virus through West Africa. Tadjo explores the critical questions of how to cope in a global crisis and combat the fear and prejudice associated with a pandemic.

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In Conversation

Véronique Tadjo

Véronique Tadjo

Véronique Tadjo is a writer, poet, novelist, and artist from Côte d’Ivoire. She earned a doctorate in Black American Literature and Civilization from the Sorbonne, Paris IV, and went to the United States as a Fulbright scholar at Howard University in Washington, D.C. She headed the French Department of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg up until 2015. Her books have been translated into several languages, from The Blind Kingdom (1991) to The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda (2001) and Queen Pokou: Concerto for a Sacrifice (2005), which was awarded the Grand Prix de Littérature d’Afrique Noire 2005.

Photo Credit: Odile Motelet
Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah is Professor of Philosophy and Law at NYU. Earlier, he taught at the University of Ghana, Cambridge, Yale, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, and Princeton. He grew up in Ghana and received undergraduate and doctoral degrees in philosophy from Cambridge University in England, where he was an undergraduate, a graduate student, and a research fellow of Clare Colle. His work has been in the philosophy of mind and language, ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of art, of culture, and of the social sciences, especially anthropology; as well as in literary studies, where he has focused on African and African-American literature. In 2012, President Obama presented him with the National Humanities Medal. His publications include Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity, As If: Idealization and Ideals, and The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, along with three novels, one set at his alma mater, Clare College. Professor Appiah writes the weekly Ethicist column for the New York Times Sunday magazine.

Featured Book

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In the Company of Men

By Véronique Tadjo

Published by Other Press

Two boys venture from their village to hunt in a nearby forest, where they shoot down bats with glee and cook their prey over an open fire. Within a month, they are dead, bodies ravaged by an insidious disease that neither the local healer’s potions nor the medical team’s treatments could cure. Compounding the family’s grief, experts warn against touching the sick. But this caution comes too late: the virus spreads rapidly, and the boys’ father is barely able to send his eldest daughter away for a chance at survival.

In a series of moving snapshots, Véronique Tadjo illustrates the terrible extent of the Ebola epidemic, through the eyes of those affected in myriad ways: the doctor who tirelessly treats patients day after day in a sweltering tent, protected from the virus only by a plastic suit; the student who volunteers to work as a gravedigger while universities are closed, helping the teams overwhelmed by the sheer number of bodies; the grandmother who agrees to take in an orphaned boy cast out of his village for fear of infection. And watching over them all is the ancient and wise Baobab tree, mourning the dire state of the earth yet providing a sense of hope for the future.

Acutely relevant to our times in light of the coronavirus pandemic, In the Company of Men explores critical questions about how we cope with a global crisis and how we can combat fear and prejudice.