Welcome to the African Online Digital Library Gallery section. The following galleries are thematic and scholarly groupings of holdings from within the AODL. To browse the galleries, choose a link from below.

Passport to Paradise has been curated by Drs. Mary Nooter Roberts (Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Fowler) and Allen F. Roberts (Professor, UCLA Department of World Arts & Cultures and Director, James S. Coleman African Studies Center), and will be seen at the Fowler from February through October 2003. These fifty photographs were taken by the curators or by staff or friends of the Fowler, and are used here with permission. The book Aura and Icon in Contemporary Senegal (working title) by Allen F. Roberts and Mary Nooter Roberts published in 2003 to accompany the exhibition will be distributed by the University of Washington Press. A website launched in 2000 introduces the exhibition at http://www.fmch.ucla.edu/passporttoparadise.htm. Dakar is a boldly visual city. Images abound, despite the fact that Senegal is a largely Muslim country. The focus of “‘Passport to Paradise’” is upon the urban visual culture of the Mourides, a Senegalese Sufi movement centered upon the life and teachings of a local saint named Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1853-1927). Mouride visual culture includes “art” as that term is understood in the West, but it comprises a far wider range of popular expression from devotional icons to murals, advertising images to drawings that protect and heal, cosmological architecture to abstract paintings, illustrated web sites to souvenirs for tourists. Images of Amadou Bamba actively convey his blessings, and the mystical properties of these images provides Mourides with a “visual piety” that lends structure to their lives.

In 1987 Ray Silverman, art historian at Michigan State, worked in the community of Bondoukou, close to the border with Ghana. Bondoukou is a predominantly Akan city, capital of the pre-colonial state of Akan and part of the Asante Empire for considerable portions of the 18th and 19th centuries. It has also been the home to a significant Muslim minority, often called Juula. They were engaged especially in internal trade along the long-distance routes between the north (savanna) and south (forest). In this gallery he has given us sample photographs of some of the mosques of Bondoukou and the environs; you will note that the architecture of the mosques comes in two styles: the older, more indigenous Sudanese style, which you can find in such well-known savanna cities as Jenne, and a newer style reminiscent of Saudi Arabia or Egypt, which often is favored by those who have made the pilgrimage and studied in the Middle East.

In 1968-9 David Robinson, historian at Michigan State, did intensive interviewing in the middle valley of the Senegal River. This region is more than 200 miles wide, from west to east, but only about 20 miles from north to south, comprising the two banks of the river and the immediate hinterlands. In the 18th and 19th centuries this area was called Futa Toro and was ruled by an imam or Almamy (al-imam). Robinson‚s interviews describe the emergence of this Islamic state, its varied fortunes in the 19th century and eventual conquest by the French, and the Muslim culture for which it became known. He used these interviews to write a book, Chiefs and Clerics. Abdul Bokar Kane and the History of Futa Toro (Oxford, 1975), and then team up with Mohammed Moustapha Kane to publish some excerpts from these interviews in The Islamic Regime of Fuuta Tooro. An Anthology of Oral Tradition Transcribed in Pulaar and Translated into English (African Studies Center, Michigan State University, 1984). Today Futa Toro is divided between Mauritania (the north bank) and Senegal (the south bank).