Synopsis: Today Gretel Clark has a BA from Vassar College, an MA from University of Michigan, and CAS from Harvard University. She has taught on four continents, raised four children, and is currently a beekeeper in Hamilton, Massachusetts. [Read more…]

“An extraordinary account of an idealistic young couple changing the world in newly-independent Nigeria in the early 1960s. The Introduction and Afterword frame the experience in terms of the motivations, hopes, and longer-term careers of these extraordinary young people. The letters to home, accompanied by a wealth of photographs, offer an immediate response to the experience of living in a very different culture and environment, of the swirling ideological currents in a young country casting off imperialism, but being enmeshed in cold-war rivalries of the international system. [Read more…]

“Letters from Nigeria is a delight. Nigeria, brash and proud, was brand-new in 1961. So were Gretel and Peter Clark, engaged as wide-eyed expatriates in novel, unpredictable, immersive explorations of their host nation and themselves. These infectiously charming letters home provide an unexpectedly telling, immediate, commentary on Africa’s largest country before it lapsed into cynicism, corruption, and civil war. Clark writes of a Lagos, which will never be recaptured.”

— Robert I. Rotberg, Harvard Kennedy School, author of Africa Emerges