Niger

  How have different forms of colonialism shaped societies and their politics? William F. S. Miles (Niger 1977-79) focuses on the Hausa-speaking people of West Africa whose land is still split by an arbitrary boundary established by Great Britain and France at the turn of the century. In 1983 Miles returned as a Fulbright scholar to the region where he had served as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Already fluent in the Hausa language, he established residence in carefully selected twin villages on either side of the border separating the Republic of Niger from the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Over the next year, and then during subsequent visits, he traveled by horseback between the two places, conducting archival research, collecting oral testimony, and living the ethnographic life. Miles argues that the colonial imprint of the British and the French can still be discerned more than a generation after the conferring of . . .

Rogue Elephants: a novel of the Peace Corps by Dan Grossman (Niger 1992-94) Lulu Publisher $16.00 (paperback) 300 pages2013 (Reissued) Reviewed by Richard M. Grimsrud (India 1965-67) For the most part, Dan Grossman’s novel Rogue Elephants is a fast and informative read about Peace Corps operations during the early Nineties in southeast Niger, a little-known area in West Africa at the southern edge of the Sahara adjacent to where the terrorist group Boko Haram (which literally means “Western education is sinful and forbidden” in Hausa) recently kidnapped 276 schoolgirls. The book provides among its many interesting insights a look at how the Peace Corps experience can affect sexual diversity and assault and a good ethnographic sketch of Hausa culture, from which Boko Haram has drawn most of its adherents. Hausa culture is a fusion of Arab and traditional black African systems, which grew up in the Sudan/Sahel zone with the . . .

The back page of The Chronicle Review always has a thoughtful short essay written by an academic (yes, some academics can write) and it is usually what I turn to when the weekly Chronicle of Higher Education arrives. (This publication, by the way, is one of the best edited papers in the U.S.) The November 8, 2013, issue has an essay entitled “A Used Book, A Lost Era” by William F.S. Miles (Niger 1977-79) that tracks how he found a used copy of R.C. Abraham’s 992-page Dictionary of the Hausa Language, that he had as a PCV in Niger, and that he would use later when he was a Fulbright Scholar in Niger. He found a used copy of Abraham’s dictionary on sale at Amazon for $25. He bought the book and he writes with great feeling and great regret: I opened the shipping packet with the kind of anticipation . . .