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Djinns, Stars and Warriors: Mandinka Legends from Pakao, Senegal BY MATTHEW SCHAFFER African Sources for African History 5. Leiden: Brill, 2003. xvi + 222 pp. ISBN 1567-6951 paper.
This work contains a series of texts, mostly oral but some written, from a highly Islamaized Mande community in Senegal. They are published in the original Mandinka with facing English translations. The author is an anthropologist who co-produced a short ethnography of this region several decades ago (Matt Schaffer and Christine Cooper, Mandinko: The Ethnography of a West African Holy Land, New York: Holt, 1980). The present volume provides readers with some of the documentation of that project. It appears within a history series (the reviewer is a member of its board but had no role in the publication at hand) and the texts address mainly...