The Passport to Paradise gallery highlights the bold, visual images found all over Dakar by focusing 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.

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Photograph of Bamba in a Car Rapides
Description: Images of the Saint based on the 1913 photograph are placed in the windshields of car rapides, the colorful urban taxi buses of Dakar, and other vehicles of public transport. Sometimes the images are photocopies of the photograph, and other times, as here, they are painted renditions of the photo. It is thought that the image of the Saint blesses and protects those who travel under his watchful gaze.
Publication Date: January 1, 1995
AODL Contributing Partner: Passport to Paradise
Copyright: Images and text courtesy of the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, and 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).
Author: Roberts, Mary Nooter, Roberts, Allan F.
Interviewer: Interviewer Unknown

Sampling from L'Institut Fondemental d'Afrique Noire (IFAN)

Phil Curtin Collection

Collection Boubacar Barry

Collection Charles Becker: Recherches et documents sur le Sida

Photographs from “Passport to Paradise’: Sufi Arts of Senegal and Beyond

Mosques of Bondoukou

Futa Toro, Senegal and Mauritania

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