Away from Africa

Photo courtesy of Suzanne Lehn Boukary Konaté , 1977 (?) - September 2017 He left us much too soon. Around early 2009, as I was still new on Twitter, I looked for Africa-centric communities and found  Global Voices , and then Claire Ulrich , Anna Gueye , and finally Boukary Konaté  from Bamako, Mali. We became quite friendly - albeit online - and I admired his desire to further his own education as well as promote and safeguard Malian culture, and bring the internet to rural areas. A group of his online friends, led by First World Music 's Akenataa Hammagaadji, in New York, sent him a solar backpack for that purpose. Boukary was a teacher in a Bamako high school. He wrote one of the rare blogs in Bambara, in fact one of the rare blogs in any African language in general: Fasokan . The blog won a Bobs (Best of the Blogs) award in 2012. In 2014, he created a blog and Facebook page called " Quand le Village se réveille " (When the village awakes), that showcased t...

The word "toubab" means "white person" in Wolof, a language spoken in Senegal, and also in Bambara (Mali). Why use this term for the name of this accessories company? Because Maud Villaret, the head designer, is a toubab herself; Toubab Paris brings two worlds together, and symbolozes the back and forth between the continents. I was attracted by her whimsical designs, and curious to find out how she came about creating African themed accessories... Maud in NYC Born and raised in France,  Maud attended a well-known design school, the Ecole Duperré , majoring in textile arts. During her last year in school, she traveled to Mali for an Indigo workshop. Indigo dye is a natural dye, from the plant   Indigofera tinctoria  - it is written that the dye was first widely used in India (ancient Phoenicia used a similar color that came from a rock snail, the Murex). Nowadays, Indigo is still widely used in Western Africa, in countries such as Guinea, Senegal and Mali. ...

November 2014: Mr. Jerome Vogel passed away peacefully on September 10, 2014, of an apparent heart attack. May he rest in peace. The below post was originally published July 25, 2014. Jerry Vogel was getting ready to leave for  Mali , to take a group of students from all over the  United States  on a tour. He’s been traveling throughout Sub-Saharan Africa since the 1960s. Having arrived for the first time in  Cameroon  fifteen years later, I was eager to hear of his impressions from those post-independence years. Above: to the right, a Cameroonian Calebasse Jerry Vogel is a born and bred New Yorker: he lived in the Bronx , until he left for Hamilton College . He received a Fulbright Scholarship to study for a year in France . After completing graduate studies in English Literature, he taught at Georgetown University for five years, when he applied for a teaching position at the university in Abidjan , Ivory Coast . At that point he knew not...