The cattle killing
By: John Edgar Wideman.
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Boston
Language: eng
Number of pages: 212
Subjects: African Americans -- Fiction; African American clergy -- Fiction; Africans -- United States -- Fiction; African American families -- Fiction; Race relations -- Fiction; Philadelphia (Pa.) -- Fiction
Description: In plague-ridden eighteenth-century Philadelphia, a young black itinerant preacher searches for a mysterious, endangered African woman. His struggle to find her and save them both plummets him into the nightmare of a society violently splitting itself into white and black, white over black.

Spiraling outward from its core image of the Xhosa people's ritual destruction of their herd in a vain attempt to resist European domination - the cattle killing - the novel expands its narrator's search for meaning and love into the America, England, and South Africa of yesterday and today.