Jeune Afrique
By Moses Marz In 1968, Béchir Ben Yahmed launched his first attempt at establishing an anglophone version of Jeune Afrique by producing annual “Reference Volumes on the African Continent”. The books are up to 450 pages thick and are presented as essential business guides produced by an “impartial team of journalists”. In 1972, Ben Yahmed […]
Jeune Afrique Map
Co-founded in 1960 by Bechir Ben Yahmed, the weekly magazine Jeune Afrique has been instrumental in cementing the divide between the “Arab North” and “Black Africa” . It is also a key agent in “Francafrique Project”, the network of personal relationships and political, economic and military mechanisms that bind France to its former African colonies. […]
On the Meaning of the Timbuktu Manuscripts
By Shamil Jeppe Timbuktu is symbolic. I mean it’s a place, but it’s also, for me, a symbol of a written tradition across a huge region. In symbolic terms it calls attention to traditions of writing that pre-dated the introduction of the European script and the printed book. Because if you look at the history […]
Souffles
By Toni Maraini The first issue was thin, but it responded “to an imperative demand”. Soon it reached 100 pages. Khaïr-Eddine had by then migrated to France and his name does not figure in the comité d’action, but his presence was assured by his poems. Haunted and solitary, Khaïr-Eddine (whose mother tongue was Berber) had […]
El-Salahi – The Wise Enemy
By Hassan Musa I want to introduce Ibrahim El-Salahi here as “our teacher,” using the first-person pronoun, although I did not personally have the honour of being his student when he was teaching drawing and painting at the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum. I entered the college in 1970, a year after […]