African woman warrior captures BU historian’s passion

Excerpt from BU Today-

“Linda Heywood tells a story of how her elderly grandmother in Grenada, who raised the year-old baby after her mother died, would often repeat an inscrutable word that sounded like “boh-wah.” It wasn’t until many decades later, at a London archive dense with forgotten records, that Heywood held in her hands a faded document attesting to her Barbadian grandfather’s service in Her Majesty’s Navy in the Boer War. It turned out that her grandmother’s half-delirious chant resulted from her exhausting, but ultimately successful, bid to get the colonial government of Barbados to pay her the benefits due her husband, Joseph A. Maxwell, who died six months after his return from the front. “

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