Anna Badkhen

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Kabir Dhanji. Four men walking across the desert in the Afar toward the village of Buri, in eastern Ethiopia, an area riddled with fossils dating back as far as 4.2 million years, March 16, 2020

LALIBELA, ETHIOPIA—I came to Ethiopia for book research that has to do with displacement and Eden, and tracing our beginnings as humans. How could I have known that the trip I had meticulously planned for months would be so ill-timed, that the world would be so anxious about endings?

I left the United States when coronavirus cases seemed localized in California and New York, but hand-sanitizer was already gone from shops. The day I landed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia confirmed its first case of coronavirus.

A bellyful of worry increasingly accompanies my quest to contemplate our origins, the history of our relationship with place, and human movement, ancient and modern.…  Seguir leyendo »

In the early 19th century, a Fulani scholar, cleric and trilingual poet named Uthman dan Fodio launched one of West Africa's earliest jihads. Hurtling camelback and horseback, Dan Fodio and his followers delivered Islam to the mostly animist rural savanna on the tips of their spears and broadswords. In the flood plains of the Inner Niger Delta, in what today is central Mali, one of Dan Fodio's disciples, a Fulani orphan named Ahmad bin Muhammad Boubou bin Abi Bakr bin Sa'id al Fulani Lobbo, led an Islamic rebellion and founded the theocratic empire of Massina. Modern-day Fulani remember and revere him by his nom de guerre, Sekou Amadou — Sheik Mohammed.…  Seguir leyendo »