The First People on Earth

Theo doesn’t speak. At just 9 years old, his dreams draw him inexorably back to Africa, far from Germany where he lives. When his mother pulls him out of school to leave for Namibia, where she is from, the child discovers that the world he has always carried within him is real. Where adults have learned to separate the living from the dead, the colonizers from the colonized, humans from animals, Theo perceives only a single, continuous world.

As his mother uncovers the family that had been hidden from her, the child quietly reassembles what generations had sought to keep apart. When, after three years, his voice finally returns, it is only a few words – but they contain what is essential.