Reframing Vernacular Culture on Arabic Fault Lines: Bamba, Senghor, and Sembene's Translingual Legacies in French West Africa

PMLA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annette Damayanti Lienau
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
West African ◽  
French West Africa ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Vernacular Culture ◽  
Arabic Script ◽  
History Of ◽  
African Context ◽  
Sub Saharan

This PMLA cluster invites us to rethink questions of language, script, and literary traditions in a long-historical framework. Several other essays here address the inter-imperial dynamics accompanying the rise of Arabic from a localized dialect to a transregional language with a religious valence. My contribution considers the legacy of the Arabic language in the twentieth-century sub-Saharan West African context, in its contact with Senegalese vernaculars and with French as an imperial challenger. It further explores the broader implications of retracing the longue durée history of Arabic-script vernaculars for comparative work in postcolonial studies.

PRECOLONIAL AKAN TOWNS Building Technology and Settlement Planning in a West African Civilization: Precolonial Akan Cities and Towns. By TARIKHU FARRAR. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996. Pp. xi + 217. No price given (ISBN 0-7734-2262-5).

1997 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-177
Author(s):  
JOHN PARKER
Keyword(s):  
Architectural History ◽  
West African ◽  
Building Technology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Recent Conference ◽  
History Of ◽  
African Context ◽  
Physical Organization ◽  
Economic Conflict ◽  
Southern Ghana

Judging from the recent conference on Africa's Urban Past held at London's School of Oriental and African Studies, historians are increasingly – if somewhat belatedly – joining their colleagues in the social sciences in recognizing the continent's towns and cities as fruitful fields of research. While urban historians of North America and Europe have long regarded the built environment as a valuable source, the form of towns is only beginning to emerge as a topic of serious consideration in the African context. It is gratifying to note, therefore, that a number of contributors to the SOAS conference chose to focus on the ways in which both indigenous concepts of settlement and the physical organization of space have shaped Africa's urban centres as arenas of social, political and economic conflict. It is with these issues in mind that the reviewer approached this study of the architectural history of a people with a long tradition of urbanism and a highly nuanced terminology of settlement, the Akan of southern Ghana.

Parrots and Starlings

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher GoGwilt ◽  
Melanie D. Holm
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Word Classification ◽  
History Of ◽  
Methodological Problems ◽  
Human Animal

This chapter introduces the sense in which “mocking birds” applies to a range of birds that mimic and introduces the different kinds of “technologies” (avian, human, interspecies, poetic, mechanic, etc.) variously addressed by the volume’s contributors. Taking the pairing of parrot and starling as paradigmatic across a range of different philological traditions, the introduction surveys some of the foundational theoretical and methodological problems for the human sciences presented by the topic of bird mimicry. The parrot, global sign of a long history of human-animal mimicry, appears everywhere across different linguistic and literary traditions, a familiar and exotic trope that is something of a touchstone for postcolonial studies. The starling adds to that familiar and exotic trope a complication of classification, cultural difference, and bio-diversity (including all the various mynah birds also called starlings). The foundational problems of bird and word classification posed by parrot and starling extend to the range of scientific, poetic, linguistic, and post-human issues discussed by the volume as a whole, whether addressing this bird, that bird, or even no bird at all.

Ancient History of Technology in West Africa: The Indigenous Glass/Glass Bead Industry and the Society in Early Ile-Ife, Southwest Nigeria

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 501-527 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abidemi Babatunde Babalola
Keyword(s):  
Compositional Analysis ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
West African ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Glass Technology ◽  
Ancient Glass ◽  
Southwest Nigeria ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sub Saharan

The technology of glassmaking is complex. This complexity has been cited for the exclusion of the development of ancient glass technology from certain regions of the world, especially Africa, South of the Sahara. Thus, much of the existing scholarship on the technology of ancient glass has focused on the Middle East, Mediterranean, and Southeast and South Asia. Although the discourse on indigenous African technology has gained traction in Black studies, the study of ancient glass seems to have been left mainly in the hands of specialists in other disciplines. Drawing from archaeological and historical evidence from Ile-Ife, Southwest Nigeria, in tandem with the result of compositional analysis, this article examines the first recognized indigenous Sub-Saharan African glass technology dated to early second millennium ad or earlier. The development of the local glass recipe and the making of beads not only ushered in a social, religious, and economic transformation in Yorubaland as well as the other West African societies but also redressed the place of Sub-Saharan African in the historiographical map of ancient global technology and commerce.

Aḥmadu Bamba's Pedagogy and the Development of ʿAjamī Literature

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fallou Ngom
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
African Literature ◽  
West African ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
European Languages ◽  
History Of

Abstract:While African literature in European languages is well-studied, ʿajamī and its significance in the intellectual history of Africa remains one of the least investigated areas in African studies. Yet ʿajamī is one of the oldest and most widespread forms of literature in Africa. This article draws scholars' attention to this unmapped terrain of knowledge. First, it provides a survey of major West African ʿajamī literary traditions and examines the nexus between the pedagogy of Aḥmadu Bamba and the development of Wolofal (Wolof ʿajamī). Then, with reference to excerpts from Sëriñ Masoxna Ló's 1954 eulogy, it discusses the role of Wolofal in the diffusion of the Murīd ethos.

Biography Writing in Swahili

1997 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 299-307 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farouk Topan
Keyword(s):  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
African Coast ◽  
History Of ◽  
African Context ◽  
City States ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

Any meaningful assessment of biography and autobiography writing among the Swahili as a historical source needs to take at least three factors into consideration. The first is the influence of Arab literary traditions on the emergence of the genre on the East African coast; the second is the relationship between literacy and orality, and its implication for writing and narration in an African context. The role of colonialism, and the introduction of the Western “mode” of biography and autobiography writing, forms the third factor. The aim of the paper is to survey these factors, not chronologically, but as part of a general discussion on the notion and status of the genre in the Swahili context.Swahili interface with Arabic as an essential ingredient of Islamic practice laid the foundation for the development of literate genres on the East African coast, among them the biographical and the historical. In the process, Swahili adopted styles of narrative expression which are reflected in the terms employed for them. The most common are habari (from the Arabic khabar) and wasifu (from wasf). In its original usage, khabar denoted a description of an event or events that were connected in a single narrative by means of a phrase such as “in that year.” It lacked a genealogy of narrators, and the form was stylistically flexible to include verses of poetry relevant to the events. In Swahili the current meaning of the word habari is “information” and “news” (and, hence, also a greeting) but, as a historical genre, it has been used in two ways. The first is in relation to the history of the city-states recounted through documents whose titles include the word, khabari/habari, (or the plural, akhbar in Arabic), usually translated as “chronicle(s).”

The Archival System of Former French West Africa

1965 ◽  
Vol 8 (01) ◽  
pp. 48-58
Author(s):  
G. Wesley Johnson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Current Status ◽  
World War ◽  
French West Africa ◽  
Parent Organization ◽  
Equatorial Africa ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government

In September and October of 1964, I visited the various centers once forming links in the archival system of French West Africa. Contrary to what occurred in Equatorial Africa, the French left these archival holdings in place, except for current material which was shipped to the rue Oudinot (Ministry of Colonies) in Paris. The center of the West African system was the Archives of the Government-General in Dakar (later the High Commission). Based originally on the Senegalese holdings, this archive became an independent agency of the federal government and was the parent organization of subsidiary archives for Senegal, Mauritania, Soudan, Upper Volta, Niger, Dahomey, Ivory Coast, and Guinea. It was parallel in structure to the Institut Français d'Afrique Noire (IFAN), which also had its headquarters in Dakar and maintained subsidiary centers for each territory. In some cases, the archives and IFAN centers were amalgamated (during World War II) and the history of the two organizations is often inseparable. This survey is an attempt to describe the establishment and development of these archival centers, how their material was organized and can be used for research, and their current status in the independent countries.

“As on a Darkling Plain”: Practitioners, Publics, Propagandists, and Ancient Historiography

2012 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. C. McCaskie
Keyword(s):  
West African ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Complex State ◽  
State And Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sub Saharan

I am a professor of the history of Africa. I have spent four decades researching and writing about the historic West African forest kingdom of Asante (or Ashanti, now in Ghana), the most richly documented and most complex state and society in all of sub-Saharan Africa. In recent years I have become intrigued by the ways in which African histories authored by academic practitioners have been subjected to an ever-rising tide of readings, and misreadings, by interested publics and partisan propagandists. This paper addresses the problematic but understudied interaction between practitioners, publics, and propagandists in the understanding of history today. However, it is not about Africa.

A note on the relative importance of slaves and gold in West African exports

1974 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Bean
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Foreign Exchange ◽  
Regional Differences ◽  
Statistical Evidence ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sub Saharan

Specialists in the history of West Africa disagree about the relative importance of slaves and other commodities in African exports. Examination of the rough statistical evidence that is available indicates that slave exports earned less foreign exchange for Africa than did the single most important other export through four of the five centuries of contact between sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. There were large regional differences in the pattern of African exports, and it was the dominance of gold in total African export which helped make the Gold Coast the focus of European rivalries in West Africa.

scholarly journals New Insights Into c.815_824dup Pathogenic Variant of BRCA1 in Inherited Breast Cancer: A Founder Mutation of West African Origin

2022 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Pascal Demba Diop ◽  
Andréa Régina Gnilane Sène ◽  
Yacouba Dia ◽  
Seydi Abdoul Ba ◽  
Serigne Saliou Mbacke ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Breast Cancer ◽  
West African ◽  
Pathogenic Variant ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
African Origin ◽  
Founder Mutations ◽  
Inherited Breast Cancer ◽  
History Of ◽  
Out Of Africa ◽  
Sub Saharan

Founder mutations have been reported in BRCA1 and BCRA2 in different ethnic groups with inherited breast cancer. Testing of targeted mutations in specific populations is important for cancer prevention in mutation carriers. In Sub-Saharan Africa, only a few studies have reported specific founder mutations in inherited breast cancer. The pathogenic variant c.815_824dup of BRCA1 has been reported as the most frequent among African American populations with inherited breast cancer and was supposed to have a West African origin. Recent report from Senegal identified this variant in women with inherited breast cancer at the highest frequency ever reported. The variant was linked to a common haplotype confirming its founder effect in West Africa. In this article, we review the mutation history of c.815_824dup and discuss how it spread out of Africa through the transatlantic slave trade.

Musics of Algeria: Selected Recordings

1995 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dwight Reynolds
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
West African ◽  
The West ◽  
Folk Traditions ◽  
Musical Traditions ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
The Many

Algeria holds a singular place for Arab culture as a region in which the musical traditions of Islamic Spain, the Ottoman Empire, the eastern Arab countries (the Mashriq), Saharan and West Africa, Berbers, Bedouin and Europe have all interacted to various degrees. Morocco to the west was never as directly exposed to Ottoman and eastern Arab musical traditions; Tunisia and Libya to the east have had far less contact with sub-Saharan and West African musics and far more direct contact with the musics of their eastern neighbors. To simplify this complex musical landscape to some degree, the many distinct musical traditions of Algeria can be roughly divided into five groups: 1) Andalusian traditions, 2) Urban popular traditions, 3) Arabic-language folk traditions, 4) Berber and Saharan traditions, 5) the modern rai, or “pop-rai,” phenomenon. Recordings listed below have been selected for their representativeness and availability in the United States and Canada.

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