A key figure in that country and in that growth, up to his death in 1995, was Cardinal Ekandem, the first Anglophone West-African bishop - the first of many - and an outstanding churchman of the 20th Century.


Fr Michael Edem's scholarly biography of the Cardinal is a fascinating account of a journey from life in a traditional African village to the consistory of cardinals of the Catholic Church in Rome.


It will be of enormous interest to a wider public for the author's personal knowledge of the cardinal and of the Efiok/Ibibio culture in which they both grew up.