For quite a long time now I have been trying to get hold of the following novel by Mamadou Samb:

De pulpe et d’orange: Autobiographie d’une prostituée dans une ville ouest-africaine
(Enda-Editions, 1990)

It appears to be too hard even for Amazon.fr to find it. I placed an order months ago and they keep coming back with a mail saying that they are still looking for it. If you happen to have a copy of this book or know where I could find it, please come forward and help the reader in distress!

Why is it that the West’s attempts to help the poor fail year after year? There are no easy answers to this question, but Easterly, with a very sharp pen, suggests that the aid institutions need to step out of their traditional patterns and change their mentality from what the author calls “planners” into “searchers.”  The book opens with a terribly familiar image that I too have encountered in Ethiopia. Amaretch, a small Ethiopian girl, is too poor to go to school and carries firewood to help her family: 

Amaretch - A snapshot from The White Man’s Burden by William Easterly:  

“I am driving out of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to the countryside. An endless line of women and girls is marching in the opposite direction, into the city. They range in age from nine to fifty-nine. Each one is bent nearly double under the load of firewood. The heavy loads propel them forward almost at a trot. I think of slaves driven along by an invisible slave driver. They are carrying the firewood from miles outside of Addis Ababa, where there are eucalyptus forests, and across the denuded lands encircling the city. The women bring the wood to the main city market, where they will sell it for a couple of dollars. That will be it for their day’s income, as it takes all day for them to heft firewood into Addis and to walk back.” 

The rest of this snapshot and the entire first chapter of Easterly’s book are available online here

  I have added a new page to my blog today. I thought it might add some value to my blog if I had a separate page in which I write about the books I’m reading. I’m doing this because eventually all the posts disappear in the black hole of the archives, so this new page works like an archive that can be read without further clicks. If I’m over-excited on any particular book I will also write separate posts on those!  

A Saint in the City. Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal by Allen F. Roberts and Mary Nooter Roberts, with Gassia Armenian and Ousmane Gueye. Finally I have a copy of my own of this beautiful book! Anyone who has been to Senegal knows how powerful a role the visual has in the Mouride community. 

When the World Began by Elisabeth Laird.  I have actually borrowed this book from a friend of mine. These stories of cunning animals and ancient kings have been collected in Ethiopia. I almost said it’s a children’s book but I think this is very nice reading to anyone really. I only wonder how big part of the stories that for decades and centuries were told from one generation to another have already died because they were not written down.

Aujourd’hui au Sénégal by Fabrice hervieu-Wane, Aurélia Fronty, Florent Silloray. This book is one of the Gallimard Jeunesse series in which the authors have combined a story in diary format with nice illustrations and some encyclopedic elements, the topic here being of course Senegal and Senegalese history and customs. The story is told from the viewpoint of a twelve-year-old boy named Bocar and his diary is indeed very informative, from how to use alternative energy sources like solar power, to how the wives keep their husbands from running after other women, to what the holy month of Ramadan means to a small boy. There’s one thing that bothers me though, namely the “French lense” through which some of the stories or topics are perceived. The book is written with good intensions - and of course with French money and French distribution channels. The two countries have a common past, true, but does it really have to be underlined in such a pretentious way? It’s almost as if the publisher were trying to ease the young French readers’ minds to the fact that Senegal was colonized by the French.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Have just started this novel on the Nigeria-Biafra war - it’s a page-turner. The author, who also wrote Purple Hibiscus (still on my “to be read later” list) has a very good web site here.

Contes wolof du Baol collected by Jean Copans and Philippe Couty. Stories from Senegal, translated from Wolof into French.

Tante Astou, one of Cheikh Aliou Ndao’s female characters, got sacked from the Koranic school - daara - because she had an attitude. She wanted to understand the verses written in Arabic in her wooden tablet, instead of only reciting and memorizing them, and she also refused to accept the occasional physical punishments by the Marabout. Way to go Astou!

I wanted to add here a clip of the Arabic version of the children’s ABC song called Alif-Baa-Taa but unfortunately it is missing from my archives.  I may have deleted it in my yesterday’s ardour before formatting my laptop. I never really learnt to sing this song myself but I remember it had a funny, somehow nationalist, echo in it. If you know more about the background of this song I would appreciate if you could share it with us all - many thanks in advance!

I was hoping to take with me Tayeb Salih’s The Season of Migration to the North as a present to Dakar, so I looked for a copy in seven different book shops today, to no avail. The English book shops in the town are quite good, but the rest…  What is it with the staff when almost as a rule they replied to my query with no more, no less than: “Never heard”. What does that r e a l l y mean? To me that sounds almost offensive and most unhelpful and unprofessional, it’s as if now that I have spitted out a name other than Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, or Amélie Nothomb, it’s an immense effort for them to get interested for a few moments and look it up in their databases.

Instead of Salih I then bought a copy of Muuminpappa’s Memoirs by Tove Jansson, with illustrations. This is a French edition and the series’ cover points out the book’s target age goup: 8-10 years. Control freaks! When I was nine years old I borrowed from my school library a hair-raisingly graphic novel called Turkish Delights - can’t remember who wrote it - though it took me a few days to be brave enough to take it to the counter because of the front cover drawing of a woman’s breast. The Moominvalley’s stories make a better present though, for any age group, dont’t you think?