- Watches
- Home and Garden
- UK Electronics
- UK Books
- Health and Personal Care
- UK Sporting Goods
- Clothing, Shoes and Accessories
- Electronics, Gadgets and Computers
- CDs and Music Downloads
- UK Software and Video Games
- UK Toys and Games
- UK Home and Garden
- UK Video Games
- UK Baby Clothes and Accessories
- Books On
- German Electronics
Books : History : Africa : Mali
-
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Djelimady Tounkara is only one of the memorable people you will meet in this dramatic narrative of life among the griot musicians of Mali. Born into families where music and the tradition of griot story-telling is a heritage and a privilege, Djelimady and his fellow griots -- both men and women -- live their lives at the intersection of ancient traditions and the modern entertainment industry. During the seven months he spent living and studying with Djelimady, Banning Eyre immersed himself in a world that will fascinate you as it did him.Eyre creates a range of unforgettable portraits. Some of the people who stride through his pages are internationally known, musicians like Salif Keita, Oumou Sangare, and Grammy winner Ali Farka Toure. But the lesser-known characters are equally fascinating: Adama Kouyate, Djelimady's dynamic wife; Moussa Kouyate, the Tounkara family's own griot; Yayi Kanoute, the flamboyant jelimuso (female griot) who failed to take America by storm; Foutanga Babani Sissoko, the mysterious millionaire who rebuilt an entire town and whose patronage is much sought after by the griots of Bamako.
But the picture Eyre draws is not just a series of portraits. Out of their interactions comes a perceptive panorama of life in Mali in the late twentieth century. The narrative gives us a street-level view of the transformation of musical taste and social customs, the impact
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
At a time when so-called fundamentalism has become the privileged analytical frame for understanding Muslim societies past and present, this study offers another way of looking at Islam. In an innovative combination of anthropology, history, and social theory, Benjamin Soares explores Islam and Muslim practice in an important Islamic religious centre in West Africa from the late nineteenth century to the present.
Drawing on extensive ethnography, archival research, and written sources, he provides a richly detailed discussion of Muslim religious practice—Sufism, Islamic reform, and other contemporary ways of being Muslim in western Mali and more broadly in the country.
This book provides a major contribution to the study of Islam in Africa and will be welcomed by scholars and students in history, religion, and the social sciences, particularly those interested in anthropology, Islam, colonialism and the public sphere.
-
Contradicting the popular notion that African history survived only through the oral tradition, this collection of essays examines the rich legacy of written history on the continent, specifically in Timbuktu. It brings together articles written by a number of leading international scholars from Europe, the United States, and several African countries, covering a wide range of areas in the study of Timbuktu, from archaeology and literature to the intellectual life, libraries, and private collections in Timbuktu and West Africa.
-
The extraordinary manuscripts of Timbuktu: invaluable historical documents, objects of tremendous beauty, and a testament to a great center of learning and civilization.
For centuries, trading caravans made epic journeys across the Saharan sands to reach the markets of the legendary city of Timbuktu, where they traded salt, gold, slaves, textiles—and books. By the mid-fifteenth century, Timbuktu had become a major center of Islamic literary culture and scholarship. The city's libraries were repositories of all the world's learning, housing not only works by Arab and Islamic writers but also volumes from the classical Greek and Roman worlds and studies by contemporary scholars.
The astonishing manuscripts of Timbuktu form the lavish visual heart of this book. Beautifully graphic, occasionally decorated, these exquisite artifacts reveal great craftsmanship as well as learning. All were written in the Arabic script, but not all are in Arabic, for they also feature a range of local African languages.
Aside from scholarly works, the surviving manuscripts include a wealth of correspondence between rulers, advisers, and merchants on subjects as various as taxation, commerce, marriage, divorce, adoption, breastfeeding, and prostitution, providing a vivid insight into the ordinary life and values of the day.
150 color
-
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, no place burned more brightly in the imagination of European geographers––and fortune hunters––than the lost city of Timbuktu. Africa's legendary City of Gold, not visited by Europeans since the Middle Ages, held the promise of wealth and fame for the first explorer to make it there. In 1824, the French Geographical Society offered a cash prize to the first expedition from any nation to visit Timbuktu and return to tell the tale.
One of the contenders was Major Alexander Gordon Laing, a thirty–year–old army officer. Handsome and confident, Laing was convinced that Timbuktu was his destiny, and his ticket to glory. In July 1825, after a whirlwind romance with Emma Warrington, daughter of the British consul at Tripoli, Laing left the Mediterranean coast to cross the Sahara. His 2,000–mile journey took on an added urgency when Hugh Clapperton, a more experienced explorer, set out to beat him. Apprised of each other's mission by overseers in London who hoped the two would cooperate, Clapperton instead became Laing's rival, spurring him on across a hostile wilderness.
An emotionally charged, action–packed, utterly gripping read, The Race for Timbuktu offers a close, personal look at the extraordinary people and pivotal events of nineteenth–century African exploration that changed the course of history and the shape of the modern world.
-
-
One of the crowning jewels of the Southern California coastline, the Santa Monica bay area is rich, vibrant and full of glorious splendor. This magnificent pictorial treasure faithfully chronicles the pioneering spirit of the region and a testament to the innovative development that has kept the area from losing its balance and its heart. 300 b&w and color photos.
-
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.
-
Living in the White House is a great adventure for young Sasha and Malia . . . especially when they discover a mysterious, moving bookcase that leads them into a passageway through time! Before they know it, the two curious sisters find themselves back in the time of slavery and faced with a very important challenge. Will they find the courage to help free the slaves and change the course of history forever?
-
Originally published in London in 1816, The Narrative of Robert Adams is an account of the adventures of an African American seaman who survives shipwreck, slavery, and brutal efforts to convert him to Islam, before being ransomed to the British consul. Robert Adams's story is accompanied by contemporary essays and notes ranking his experience in the context of African exploration at the time. The book's introduction examines Adams's contemporary credibility in relation to literary genres of the slave narrative and the Barbary Captivity narrative.
-
Thirty years after leaving his native Mali, Manthia Diawara has a home in New York City, and more than a few acclaimed publications to his name. Still, he cannot shake the memories of his birth country-or of his first place of self-imposed exile: the heady streets of 1960s Paris. In this bittersweet memoir, Diawara recounts a year spent looking at how the assimilation process shapes the lives and dreams of immigrants everywhere. From the nightclubs of Bamako, to the cafes of Boulevard Montparnasse, to the black neighborhoods of 1970s Washington, D.C., this important and original book shatters many cherished notions about experiencing race in the world today. At turns humorous and harrowing, beautifully written and shrewdly argued, it offers an unsentimental view of African traditions at the same time that it confronts America's most deeply ingrained prejudices.
-
This book is a dramatic true adventure. It is the first book-length account of Laing's expedition. It appeals to readers of travel, exploration, and adventure writing and was extracted in the travel section of national newspaper eg "FT". This is the incredible true story of Alexander Gordon Laing and the race to discover Timbuktu during the early part of the 19th century - a time when the African continent was still largely uncharted. In the first decades of 19th century, no place burned more brightly in the imagination of European geographers and fortune hunters, than the lost city of Timbuktu. Like the mythical city of El Dorado, the very real Timbuktu held the promise of wealth and fame. Whoever got there first was guaranteed worldwide renown. Yet, though many had tried, no European explorer had been there and returned since the Middle Ages. In 1824, the French Geographical Society offered a cash prize for the first expedition from any nation to return from Timbuktu. The British, unwilling to depend on the fate of one explorer, sent several "African travelers" on their way. "The Race for Timbuktu" focuses on two of these men: Alexander Gordon Laing, the book's protagonist and "voice," and Hugh Clapperton, the man who would become his greatest rival. The book follows Laing and Clapperton on their arduous journeys across the unforgiving Sahara, in constant battle against the elements, i