Senegal Books

The Wreck of the Medusa: The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century

Jonathan Miles

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Wreck of the Medusa is a spellbinding account of the most famous shipwreck before the Titanic, a tragedy that riled a nation and inspired Théodore Géricault’s magnificent painting The Raft of the Medusa. In June 1816, the flagship of a French expedition to repossess a colony in Senegal from the British set sail. She never arrived at her destination; her incompetent captain Hugo de Chaumareys, ignoring telltale signs of shallow waters, plowed the ship into a famously treacherous sandbar. A privileged few claimed the lifeboats while 146 men and one woman were herded aboard a makeshift raft and set adrift. Without a compass or many provisions, hit by a vicious storm the first night, and exposed to sweltering heat during the following days, the group set upon each other: mayhem, mutiny, and murder ensued. When rescue arrived thirteen days later only fifteen were alive. Meanwhile, those in the boats who made it to shore undertook a dangerous two-hundred-mile slog through the desert. Among the handful of survivors from the raft were two men whose written account of the fiasco became a bestseller that rocked France’s political foundations and provided graphic fodder for Géricault’s world-famous painting.

In Senghors Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 19601995 (Objects/Histories)

Elizabeth Harney

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Editorial Review:

In Senghor’s Shadow is a unique study of modern art in post-independence Senegal. Elizabeth Harney examines the art that flourished during the administration of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Senegal’s first president, and in the decades since he stepped down in 1980. As a major philosopher and poet of Negritude, Senghor envisioned an active and revolutionary role for modern artists, and he created a well-funded system for nurturing their work. In questioning the canon of art produced under his aegis—known as the Ecole de Dakar—Harney reconsiders Senghor’s Negritude philosophy, his desire to express Senegal’s postcolonial national identity through art, and the system of art schools and exhibits he developed. She expands scholarship on global modernisms by highlighting the distinctive cultural history that shaped Senegalese modernism and the complex and often contradictory choices made by its early artists.

Heavily illustrated with nearly one hundred images, including some in color, In Senghor’s Shadow surveys the work of a range of Senegalese artists, including painters, muralists, sculptors, and performance-based groups—from those who worked at the height of Senghor’s patronage system to those who graduated from art school in the early 1990s. Harney reveals how, in the 1970s, avant-gardists contested Negritude beliefs by breaking out of established artistic forms. During the 1980s and 1990s, artists such as Moustapha Dimé, Germaine Anta Gaye, and Kan-Si engaged with avant-garde methods and local artistic forms to challenge both Senghor’s legacy and the broader art world’s understandings of cultural syncretism. Ultimately, Harney’s work illuminates the production and reception of modern Senegalese art within the global arena.

Street Children in Senegal

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Though a short publication, it is useful in further understanding the reality of street children in Senegal 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

IMPRESSIONS:
There is not much literature or information available on street children and so I was very excited to find this publication; though short (56 pages in all), "Street Children in Senegal" provides interesting information and 18 beautiful (if that word can really be used, considering what some of them depict) black-and-white photographs. Most of Senegal's street children, like in much of Western Africa, are children who were sent by their parents to Islamic teachers ("marabouts") in order to gain a Koranic education. In Senegal, they are commonly referred to in local dialect as "talibé," an Arabic word meaning "one who seeks and asks." Though this short book is by no means comprehensive - either on street children in general or street children in Senegal - it is most definitely enlightening, with useful information and wonderful photos.

BASICS:
Part I: Introduction (pages 11-17)
- "The Street Children and African Development," by Ousmane Ndiaye
Part II: The Talibé (pages 19-43)
- "Lodging"
- "Health"
- "Their Daily Routines"
- "The Marabouts"
Part II: Conclusion (pages 45-56)
- "Approaching the Talibé Phenomenon," by Aurélie Frex
- "About GYAN France"
- "Our Project"
- "Notes on Contributors"

SUMMARY (from the back cover):
"Discover the heart-wrenching story of Senegal's street children, abandoned, left to marabouts who have exploited them in the name of religion for too long. Where local traditions clash with universal human rights, these children are left in the middle of a struggle to reclaim the human dignity that is properly theirs ..."

Editorial Review:

Black & White Edition. Discover the heart-wrenching story of these children, abandoned, left to marabouts who have exploited them in the name of religion for too long. Where local traditions clash with universal human rights, these children are left in the middle of a struggle to reclaim the human dignity that is properly theirs . . .

Wreck of the Medusa: Mutiny, Murder, and Survival on the High Seas

Alexander McKee

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Another great read! 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

A fascinating book! One you can't put down. A brutal, yet interesting account of life as it was " back then".

Good Read. 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 4 people found this review helpful.

The book is generally exciting and full of the horrors of the wrecking of the Medusa and the stuggles of the castaways. The book is so detailed about the actual grounding and wrecking of the ship that one wonders how the author was able to come up with such fine details of something that took place in 1816. It truly reads more like a novel and makes me wonder if the author didn't have to "fill in" a lot of blank spaces. Still it is a good book and well worth reading.

Editorial Review:

In 1816, a fleet of ships left France to accept the British hand-over of the port of Saint-Louis in Senegal. Among them was the frigate Medusa. A month after it set sail, she shank miles off of Africa’s west coast, leaving the passengers to flee on lifeboats and a raft cobbled together from parts of the sinking ship. After a failed attempt by those in the lifeboats to tow the raft, it—and the more than 150 people aboard—were abandoned. This is the horrific tale, filled with suicide, murder, and cannibalism, of those left behind.

Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley: African Princess, Florida Slave, Plantation Slaveowner

DANIEL L. SCHAFER

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Anna Kingsley's life story adds a dramatic chapter to histories of the South, the state of Florida, and the African diaspora. Working from surprisingly extensive records, including information and photographs from extended-family members and descendants, Daniel Shafer reconstructs and documents one slave's remarkable story. Both an American slave and a slaveowner - and possibly an African princess - Anna was a teenager when she was captured in her homeland of Senegal in 1806 and sold into slavery. Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr., a planter and slave trader from Spanish East Florida, bought her in Havana, Cuba, and took her to his St. Johns River plantation in northeast Florida, where she soon became his household manager, his wife, and eventually the mother of four of his children. Her husband formally emancipated her in 1811, and she became the owner of her own farm and twelve slaves the following year. For 25 years, life on her farm and at the Kingsley plantation on Fort George Island was relatively tranquil. But when Florida passed from Spanish to American control, and racism and discrimination increased in the American territories, Anna Kingsley and her children migrated to a colony in Haiti established by her husband as a refuge for free blacks. Amid the spiraling racial tensions of the antebellum period, Anna returned to north Florida, where she bought and sold land, sued white people in the courts, and became a central figure in a free black community. Such remarkable accomplishments by a woman in a patriarchal society are fascinating in themselves. To have achieved them as a woman of color is remarkable.

The Peoples of the Middle Niger: The Island of Gold (Peoples of Africa)

Roderick James Mcintosh

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Editorial Review:

This book provides the first comprehensive history of the peoples of the Middle Niger written by an English-speaking scholar. "The Island of Gold" was the medieval Muslim and later European name for a fabled source of gold and other tropical riches. Although the floodplain of the Niger river lies far from the goldfields, the mosaic of peoples along the Middle Niger created a wealth in grain, fish and livestock that supported some of Africa's oldest cities, including Timbuktu. These ancient cities of the region that came to be known as Western Sudan were founded without outside stimulation and their inhabitants long resisted the coercive, centralized state that characterized the origins of earliest towns elsewhere. In this book, Roderick James McIntosh uses the latest archeological and anthropological research to provide a bold overview of the distant origins of life for the inhabitants of the Middle Niger, and an explanation for their social evolution. He shows, for instance, the difficulties the peoples faced in adapting to an unpredictable climate, and how their particular social organization determined the unusual nature of their responses to that change. Throughout the book oral traditions are integrated into the story, providing vivid insights into the inhabitants' complex culture and belief systems.

Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip Hop (Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks)

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Editorial Review:

Crucial to understanding Islam is a recognition of the role of Muslim networks. The earliest networks were Mediterranean trade routes that quickly expanded into transregional paths for pilgrimage, scholarship, and conversion, each network complementing and reinforcing the others. This volume selects major moments and key players from the seventh century to the twenty-first that have defined Muslim networks as the building blocks for Islamic identity and social cohesion.

Although neglected in scholarship, Muslim networks have been invoked in the media to portray post-9/11 terrorist groups. Here, thirteen essays provide a long view of Muslim networks, correcting both scholarly omission and political sloganeering. New faces and forces appear, raising questions never before asked. What does the fourteenth-century North African traveler Ibn Battuta have in common with the American hip hopper Mos Def? What values and practices link Muslim women meeting in Cairo, Amsterdam, and Atlanta? How has technology raised expectations about new transnational pathways that will reshape the perception of faith, politics, and gender in Islamic civilization?

This book invokes the past not only to understand the present but also to reimagine the future through the prism of Muslim networks, at once the shadow and the lifeline for the umma, or global Muslim community.

Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Senegalais in French West Africa, 1857-1960 (Social History of Africa Series)

Myron Echenberg

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Human Cost of Imperialism 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 9 people found this review helpful.

When one usually thinks about imperialism, the common image is of imperial powers taking natural resources from colonized peoples for the benefit of the metropolitan power. In his book Colonial Conscripts, Myron Echenberg delves into the even more insidious practice of conscirpting a nation's young men for the colonizers' army.

The Tirailleur Senegalais fought and died for France during two World Wars and numerous colonial adventures. Unlike the British and other colonial powers, France did not recruit mercenaries from their African possesions. Instead they built a complex system of conscription that touched every village and hamlet under French control. Peasants were drafted into African units of the French Army, given rudimentary training in French culture and military tactics and then sent around the world to fight in French wars. Thousands of Tirailleurs died in trenches and fox holes of northern France.

Unlike the English, France created a fiction that their African subjects were French. In turn,they had the same rights and responsibilites as all other French citizens and this included going to war to defend the French Republic. This sort of droll cynacism was so beautifully French in its conception and implementation.

This book is not a military history of the Tirailleur Senegalais. Its focus is on the politics and experience of conscription in West Africa. This book is a detailed chronicle of French imperial cynacism.

Editorial Review:

In Colonial Conscripts, Myron Echenberg traces the social history of a large and diverse group of West Africans who served in Senegalese regiments of the French colonial army. Examining both how the soldiers and veterans lived out their lives in service and how the military institution functioned, Dr Echenberg also reviews the African military within a framework bounded by such issues as labor, migration, and demography. The main focus is on how rank-and-file African soldiers, officers, and veterans responded to their ambiguous and often contradictory position within the colonial social formation.

Battling Siki: A Tale of Ring Fixes, Race, and Murder in the 1920s

Peter Benson

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The Fix Is As Plain As Black & White 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

An oftentimes flamboyant light-heavyweight boxer has waited years for a title shot. Of Senegalese heritage, he had his ring career interrupted by World War I, where he earned honors in a unit that was used mostly as fodder by the French generals. His opponent is also a decorated veteran and - if not for the war - may have been the "Great White Hope" in the apartheid-game to dethrone heavyweight great Jack Johnson.

But the match has a twist from a proposed fix. The challenger, Battling Siki, is supposed to take a dive, actually suffering a "knockout" by falling to the canvas and thrusting his arms out as if he was crucified. Siki tries hard to fake the match, but pride takes over and he floors Georges Carpentier to win the title - the first world title by an African fighter - in a decision wracked with controversy and gamblers screaming about being double-crossed.

Author Peter Benson takes the reader on a journey into alphabet-soup boxing organizations in Europe, American mob-backed fighters, trainers, promoters and sportswriters, a contender with ties to the KKK, overt racism, the art of the fix and the battle waged by a great athlete in a blood-sport that was not only in the ring.

Within months after winning the title, Battling Siki loses a title defense in a decison to a white fighter in Dublin on St. Patrick's Day during the Irish Civil War and then traveled to the United States in pursuit of another world title match. And what he got was an inept manager, no trainer, many brutal fights and his indelible pride not letting him take a seat on the canvas. And because of that, Battling Siki was gunned down on a street in Hell's Kitchen in New York City.

Benson brings to life a fighter who has had his life defined by the racist disinformation campaign that did not rest upon his death. It is not solely a boxing biography, though Benson's descriptions of several matches literally places the reader in the ring, feeling the shots and tasting the blood from the open cuts.

Battling Siki fought many forces that were evil and though many may say he ultimately lost in the end, Benson shows a man who stared down these cowards and could only be cut down with bullets through his back.

Editorial Review:

Battling Siki (1887-1925) was once one of the four or five most recognizable black men in the world, and was written about in detail by such figures as Ring Lardner and his son John, Damon Runyon, and Westbrook Pegler...On the evening of December 15, 1925, at the age of twenty-eight, he was shot and killed in Hell's Kitchen in what some claimed was a gangland execution.

Masters of the Sabar: Wolof Griot Percussionists of Senegal (African Soundscapes)

Patricia Tang

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Editorial Review:

"Masters of the Sabar" is the first book to examine the music and culture of Wolof griot percussionists, masters of the vibrant sabar drumming tradition. Based on extensive field research in Senegal, this book is a biographical study of several generations of percussionists in a Wolof griot (gewel) family, exploring and documenting their learning processes, repertories, and performance contexts-from life-cycle ceremonies to sporting events and political meetings. Patricia Tang examines the rich history and changing repertories of sabar drumming, including dance rhythms and bakks, musical phrases derived from spoken words. She notes the recent shift towards creating new bakks which are rhythmically more complex and highlight the virtuosity and musical skill of the percussionist. She also considers the burgeoning popular music genre called mbalax. The compact disc that accompanies the book includes examples of the standard sabar repertory, as well as bakks composed and performed by Lamine Toure and his family drum troupe.