I Was Never Here and This Never Happened: Tasty Bits and Spicy Tales from My Life - Softcover

Hafner's cooking show, A Taste of Africa (already popular in Australia and the U.K.), is set to debut in the U.S. this fall, and if this chatty, utterly engaging book is any indication, it will be a huge hit. This Ghanaian native uses a lighthearted manner to tackle serious subjects. She combines autobiography, recipes, folk stories, songs and photographs to make her points. As an African woman living in Australia, Hafner offers a rare viewpoint. She devotes chapters to both her father, who suffered through her earliest attempts at cooking on a toy stove, and to her stricter mother, who ran a maternity hospital where she tried to combat clitoridectomy. Tales of Hafner's education, first in the sixth grade, where she saw her teacher killed by a grenade, and then in boarding schools, where she was taught the fine arts of soup-sipping and handkerchief-dropping in etiquette class, are illuminating. But then so are her descriptions of the culture shock she experienced when she left Ghana to study ophthalmic nursing in England. With typical humor, she recalls traveling to the local Marks and Spencer one day to purchase the "flesh-colored underwear" she had seen advertised, only to be stumped by the bins of salmon-pink lingerie. After marrying a British doctor, Hafner moved to Australia with him, but found the expected behavior of doctors' wives in direct contrast to her matrilineal background. Never less than spunky, when Hafner was prodded to give a dinner party, she refused to fulfill expectations for an African meal and instead provided a seven-course French menu. And she is no less inspired and appealing when speaking out against racism. Although she concedes that ignorance "wears you down" she never shows signs of fatigue.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Hafner's first book, A Taste of Africa (Ten Speed, 1993), was an unusual collection of traditional African recipes and other worldwide dishes derived from them. In this work, Hafner has put together an omnibus of stories based on her life growing up in Ghana, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Each story is peppered with recipes that the author grew up with and still uses today. Written in a lighthearted fashion that makes it easy to read, her book is not autobiographical but only representative of her life. The stories at the end try to convey Hafner's conviction that race made living outside of Ghana difficult; yet if this were the true purpose of her book it would have been better clarified from the beginning, allowing Hafner to use the stories more advantageously. Nonetheless, this is a delightful book with wonderful recipes. Recommended for public libraries.?Andrea C. McElrath, St. John's Univ., Staten Island, N.Y.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.