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Of Water And Spirit, Ritual, Magic and initiation in the life of an African Shaman Malidoma Patrice Somé Through The Healing Wisdom of Africa, readers can come to understand that the life of indigenous and traditional people is a paradigm for an intimate relationship with the natural world that both surrounds us and is within us. The book is the most complete study of the role ritual plays in the lives of African people -- and the role it can play for seekers in the West. |
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Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali (Revised Edition) (Longman African Writers) D T Niane This is a revision of Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, a best seller for 30 years. Retold by griots, the guardians of African Culture, this oral tradition has been handed down from the thirteenth century and captures all the mystery and majesty of medieval African kingship. It is the epic tale, based on an actual figure, of Sundiata (Sunjata). Part history and part legend, it tells how Sundiata fulfilled the prophesies that he would unite the twelve kingdoms of Mali into a powerful empire. This Revised Edition includes background information which provides a geographical, religious, social, and political context for the story. A ‘who’s who of characters’ and ‘a glossary of places’ will enhance the reader’s experience. |
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Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail (Oprah's Book Club) Malika Oufkir A gripping memoir that reads like a political thriller--the story of Malika Oufkir's turbulent and remarkable life. Born in 1953, Malika Oufkir was the eldest daughter of General Oufkir, the King of Morocco's closest aide. Adopted by the king at the age of five, Malika spent most of her childhood and adolescence in the seclusion of the court harem, one of the most eligible heiresses in the kingdom, surrounded by luxury and extraordinary privilege. Then, on August 16, 1972, her father was arrested and executed after an attempt to assassinate the king. Malika, her five younger brothers and sisters. and her mother were immediately imprisoned in a desert penal colony. After fifteen years, the last ten of which they spent locked up in solitary cells, the Oufkir children managed to dig a tunnel with their bare hands and make an audacious escape. Recaptured after five days, Malika was finally able to leave Morocco and begin a new life in exile in 1996. A heartrending account in the face of extreme deprivation and the courage with which one family faced its fate, Stolen Lives is an unforgettable story of one woman's journey to freedom. |
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Timbuktu: The Sahara's Fabled City of Gold Marq de Villiers, Sheila Hirtle Timbuktu—the name still evokes an exotic, faraway place even though its glory days are long gone. Unspooling its history and legends, resolving myth with reality, Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle have captured the splendor and decay of one of mankind’s treasures.
Founded in the early 1100s by Tuareg nomads who called their camp “Tin Buktu,” it became, within two centuries, a wealthy metropolis and a nexus of the trans-Saharan trade. Salt from the deep Sahara, gold from Ghana, and money from slave markets made it rich. In part because of its wealth, Timbuktu also became a center of Islamic learning and religion, boasting impressive schools and libraries that attracted scholars from Alexandria, Baghdad, Mecca, and Marrakech. The arts flourished, and Timbuktu gained near-mythic stature around the world, capturing the imagination of outsiders and ultimately attracting the attention of hostile sovereigns who sacked the city three times and plundered it half a dozen more. The ancient city was invaded by a Moroccan army in 1600, which began its long decline; since then it has been seized by Tuareg nomads and a variety of jihadists, in addition to enduring a terrible earthquake, several epidemics, and numerous famines. Perhaps no other city in the world has been as golden—and as deeply tarnished—as Timbuktu.
Using sources dating deep into Timbuktu’s fabled past, alongside interviews with Tuareg nomads and city residents and officials today, de Villiers and Hirtle have produced a spectacular portrait that brings the city back to life. |
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Islamization from Below: The Making of Muslim Communities in Rural French Sudan, 1880-1960 Brian J. Peterson The colonial era in Africa, spanning less than a century, ushered in a more rapid expansion of Islam than at any time during the previous thousand years. In this groundbreaking historical investigation, Brian J. Peterson considers for the first time how and why rural peoples in West Africa "became Muslim" under French colonialism. Peterson rejects conventional interpretations that emphasize the roles of states, jihads, and elites in "converting" people, arguing instead that the expansion of Islam owed its success to the mobility of thousands of rural people who gradually, and usually peacefully, adopted the new religion on their own. Based on extensive fieldwork in villages across southern Mali (formerly French Sudan) and on archival research in West Africa and France, the book draws a detailed new portrait of grassroots, multi-generational processes of Islamization in French Sudan while also deepening our understanding of the impact and unintended consequences of colonialism. |
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The Healing Drum: African Wisdom Teachings Yaya Diallo, Mitch Hall The Healing Drum traces the extraordinary cultural legacy of the Minianka tribe of West Africa, for whom music serves a sacred, healing function for the individual and society. The authors explore the Minianka view of humanity, music, and the cosmos relative to work, celebration, herbal medicine, dance, trance, initiation, and death. The first book of its kind, delivering a message of untapped wisdom and power from a little-known culture through the universal medium of music. |
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Sunjata: A West African Epic of the Mande Peoples David C. Conrad, Djanka Tassey Conde A pillar of the West African oral tradition for centuries, this epic traces the adventures and achievements of the Mande hero, Sunjata, as he liberates his people from Sumaworo Kanté, the sorcerer king of Soso, and establishes the great medieval empire of Mali. David Conrad conveys the strong narrative thrust of the Sunjata epic in his presentation of substantial excerpts from his translation of a performance by Djanka Tassey Condé. Readers approaching the epic for the first time will appreciate the translation’s highly readable, poetic English as well as Conrad’s informative Introduction and notes. Scholars will find the familiar heroes and heroines taking on new dimensions, secondary characters gaining increased prominence, and previously unknown figures emerging from obscurity. |
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Freedom: The Story of My Second Life Malika Oufkir Stolen Lives, Malika Oufkir’s intensely moving account of her twenty years imprisoned in a desert jail in Morocco, was a surprise international best seller and the second non-fiction title ever selected for Oprah’s Book Club. In her highly anticipated follow-up, Malika reflects on the life she lived before and during incarceration and how dramatically the world had changed when she emerged. Malika Oufkir was born into extreme privilege as the daughter of the king of Morocco’s closest aide, and she grew up in the palace as companion to the Moroccan princess. But in 1972, her life of luxury came to a crashing halt.Her father was executed for attempting to assassinate the king, and she and her family were locked away for two decades. After a remarkable escape, Malika and her family returned to the world they’d left behind, only to find it transformed. Living for the first time as an adult, Malika writes candidly about adjusting to the world we take for granted, from negotiating ATMs to the excesses of shopping malls, to falling in love and sex. In Stolen Lives, Malika mourned the children she was not having as she wasted away in prison. When she is finally free, motherhood becomes crucial to Malika’s ability to fully live her life: she adopts first her niece, then a baby boy from Morocco. Full of insight and piercing observations, as well as humor, Freedom is as masterful and thoughtprovoking as the original. |
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Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere (Mestizo Spaces / Espaces Metisses) Jean-Loup Amselle This innovative work seeks to reverse the perspective and reasoning of anthropology and to develop an alternative mode of conceiving culture that would not automatically privilege the colonizing West. That necessarily involves a critique of the ethnological reason” that extracts elements from their context, aestheticizes them, and then uses their supposed differences to classify types of political, economic, or religious ensembles. Such reason” yields classical oppositions like the State versus segmentary societies, market versus subsistence economies, and Islam or Christianity versus paganism.
As an alternative, the author opposes to exclusionary categories a mestizo logic” that sees social phenomena as situated on a continuum and accentuates indistinction and the originary syncretism in all cultures and other ways of categorizing human life. The book’s rich source material is drawn from the author’s fifteen years of fieldwork and research in West Africa.
The opening chapters first treat the notion of ethnological reasonits history and ideological practicesthen oppose to it the reality of cultural tension, the fact that conflicts and negotiations bring about transformations in the identity of collectivities. The following two chapters illustrate a real system of transformation, and question some basic concepts of political anthropology. The discussion continues in a more illustrative manner over the next two chapters, which present case studies of two West African societies that challenge typologies of political anthropology and ethnographic classification.
The last three chapterson white paganism, cultural identities and cultural models, and understanding and actingsituate the debate within a wider historical framework of political and cultural confrontations. Who defines ethnicities,” identities,” differences”? Where can one find them as pure essences witnessing to their own originary beings?
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Timbuktu Chronicles 1493-1599, Ta'rikh al Fattash Christopher Wise, translator Some five hundred years ago, the Askiya Muhammad founded the Songhay Dynasty of the Askiyas, which flourished for more than a century in Sahelian West Africa. The Askiya Muhammad administered his kingdom from Gao, Mali, although many of his most loyal followers were located in Timbuktu, Mali. The Timbuktu based scribe al hajj Mahmud Kati was a close friend of the Askiya Muhammad, who accompanied the famous Songhay leader during his pilgrimage to Mecca. The Tarikh al fattash is an eyewitness account of the rise and fall of the Songhay Empire, told from Kati s perspective as a key participant in many of the most important events in the era of the Askiyas. Wise s The Timbuktu Chronicles, 1493-1599 is a translation of the Octave Houdas and Maurice Delafosse s rendition of the Tarikh al fattash, which was compiled from three versions of the text that surfaced in the early twentieth century, and that were edited by Houdas and Delafosse in 1913. It includes a new introduction by Wise, as well as the original introduction and scholarly notes of Houdas and Delafosse. Although long valued as the most important historical document of the medieval period, Kati s chronicle is also a literary achievement that is comparable to the writings of figures like Chaucer, Rabelais, and Montaigne. Wise s introduction and study questions accompanying this translation provide contextualizing information for the non-specialist. The Tarikh al fattash is essential reading for all students of African literature and history. Christopher Wise deserves both our admiration and gratitude for making available to the wider world this five hundred year old chronicle the best, the most significant and the most useful on the Songhai empire. The premodern is connected with the modern; old Africa and new Africa are blended; and texts and interpretations are united to understand the past, to teach about the past, allowing us to reflect more profoundly on an era that we continue to hold in awe for its achievements, the endurance of its ideas, the brilliance of its scholars, and the grandeur of its institutions. Toyin Falola, University Distinguished Professor and the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor, University of Texas at Austin, and the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Chair of Modern Africa At-Large, Benue State University, Nigeria Thanks need to be given to Christopher Wise and Haba Abu Taleb for resurrecting Tarikh al-Fattash or The Timbuktu Chronicles, which is now available in English because of their translation. This fifteenth century text is a marvel of literature and history and its availability in this excellent English translation will provide an important new treasure for those who are interested in the history and civilization of Islam. Ricardo Rene Laremont Professor of Political Science and Sociology SUNY Binghamton |