In 1936 Modibo Keita, a twenty-year-old student at the distinguished Ecole William Ponty in Gorée, Senegal, wrote his “mémoire de fin d'étude” on Soninke childhood. The original manuscript is held in the archives of French West Africa in Dakar, part of the collection of “cahiers de William Ponty.” This paper... and En 1936 Modibo Keita, un étudiant de vingt ans à l'école distingué William Ponty à Gorée, au Sénégal, a écrit son mémoire de fin d'étude sur l’enfance sarakollé. Le manuscrit original se trouve dans les archives de l'Afrique occidentale française à Dakar, où il fait partie de la collection de...
In Muslim West Africa, food-producing villages also produced literate scholars. This study examines how such unlikely intellectuals acquired and gave meaning to Islamic knowledge through one village's experience from 1900 to the 1960s. Unlike the colonial sources underlying conventional approaches to West African Islam, libraries and oral sources from Ruumde...
In his essay on Mali, Bruce Whitehouse of Lehigh University shows how failures of elected leaders, state institutions, and external donors can shift power to the streets and an uncertain contest among armed forces.